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I. Introduction

Summary

Hamid, 35, developed a speech impediment from strain and
grief after the murder, in April 2009 in Baghdad, of his partner of ten years.
We spoke to him three weeks later; he still could only haltingly force out
words. Two friends who had helped him flee Baghdad accompanied him. All had
been in hiding through the intervening time. He said:

It was late one night in early April, and they came to take
my partner at his parents' home. Four armed men barged into the house, masked
and wearing black. They asked for him by name; they insulted him and took him
in front of his parents. All that, I heard about later from his family.

He was found in the neighborhood the day after. They had
thrown his corpse in the garbage. His genitals were cut off and a piece of his
throat was ripped out.

Since then, I've been unable to speak properly. I feel as
if my life is pointless now. I don't have friends other than those you see; for
years it has just been my boyfriend and myself in that little bubble, by
ourselves. I have no family now-I cannot go back to them. I have a death
warrant on me. I feel the best thing to do is just to kill myself. In Iraq,
murderers and thieves are respected more than gay people.

Their measuring rod to judge people is who they have sex with.
It is not by their conscience, it is not by their conduct or their values, it
is who they have sex with. The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human being, a human
life. It is cheaper than an animal, than a pair of used-up batteries you buy on
the street. Especially people like us.

Hamid began to weep:

I can't believe I'm here talking to you because it's all
just been repressed, repressed, repressed. For years it's been like that-if I
walk down the street, I would feel everyone pointing at me. I feel as if I'm
dying all the time. And now this, in the last month-I don't understand what we
did to deserve this. They want us exterminated. All the violence and all this
hatred: the people who are suffering from it don't deserve it.

A killing campaign moved across Iraq in the early months of
2009. While the country remains a dangerous place for many if not most of its
citizens, death squads started specifically singling out men whom they
considered not "manly" enough, or whom they suspected of homosexual conduct.
The most trivial details of appearance-the length of a man's hair, the fit of
his clothes-could determine whether he lived or died.

At this writing, in July 2009, the campaign remains at its
most intense in Baghdad, but it has left bloody tracks in other cities as well;
men have been targeted, threatened or tortured in Kirkuk, Najaf, Basra. Murders
are committed with impunity, admonitory in intent, with corpses dumped in
garbage or hung as warnings on the street. The killers invade the privacy of
homes, abducting sons or brothers, leaving their mutilated bodies in the
neighborhood the next day. They interrogate and brutalize men to extract names
of other people suspected of homosexual conduct. They specialize in grotesque
and appalling tortures: several doctors told Human Rights Watch about men
executed by injecting glue up their anuses. Their bodies have appeared by the
dozens in hospitals and morgues. How many have been killed will likely never be
known: the failure of authorities to investigate compounds the fear and shame
of families to ensure that reliable figures are unattainable. A well-informed
official at the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) told Human
Rights Watch in April that the dead probably already numbered "in the
hundreds."

The killings leave families terrorized and bereaved. One
Iraqi magazine, in an article sensationally promoting the need for supposed
social cleansing, could not disguise or sideline the spreading grief:

A 45-year-old mother said that an armed group of
individuals entered her house in Zayouna a week ago. They kidnapped her son
from his room, pointed a gun in her mouth and imprisoned her sick husband who
is a retired military officer in the bathroom of the house. She never saw her
son again until, a few days ago, she found his corpse in the morgue.Crying,
the mother described her son as a fashionable man who had done nothing unusual:
a sensitive man pursuing his studies at the college of arts. ... Her son's
friends had disappeared and she does not know anything about them, besides the
list of phone numbers her son left on a spare phone card among his personal
belongings.[2]

Different descriptions of the campaign's targets circulate.
Most of the men whom Human Rights Watch interviewed for this report identified
themselves as "gay." However, probably neither the murderers nor most ordinary
Iraqis would recognize the term. Instead, many describe the victims and excuse
the killings with a potpourri of words and justifications, identifying those
they abominate in shifting ways-suggesting how concerns about an Iraq where men
are no longer masculine drive the death squads, as much as fears of sexual
"sin." "Puppies," a vilifying slang term of apparently recent vintage, implies
that the men are immature as well as inhuman. Both the media and sermons in
mosques warn of a wave of effeminacy among Iraqi men, and execrate the "third
sex." Panic that some people have turned decadent or "soft" amid social change and
foreign occupation seems to motivate much of the violence.

Shadowy militias with names like Ahl al Haq (the
"People of Truth") have recently emerged into the media to claim responsibility
for some of these murders. However, most people Human Rights Watch interviewed
believed that the Mahdi Army, the militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr, bears primary
responsibility, and launched the killing in early 2009. Tellingly, Sadr City-a
center of the Mahdi Army's support, the giant Shi'ite slum in Baghdad named
after al-Sadr's martyred father-has been a fulcrum of the murder campaign.
Sadrist mosques and Mahdi Army officials have warned vividly about the
spreading dangers of the "third sex."

Springing up amid the breakdown of security after the US-led
2003 invasion (and sometimes tacitly supported, sometimes combated by the
occupation authorities), militias in Iraq feed on poverty and despair,
recruiting young men who see violence as their only future. They are loose
networks rather than disciplined entities; identifying either their members or
clear accountability for crimes committed in their names is often difficult.[3]
This is particularly true of the Mahdi Army, which strategically withdrew from
visibility at the beginning of the 2007 US "surge," avoiding confrontation with
American forces by melting into the population.

Several people speculated to us that the Mahdi Army,
striving to rebuild its reputation after this prolonged absence, sought to
rehabilitate itself by appearing as an agent of social cleansing. It exploited
morality for opportunistic purposes; it aimed at popularity by targeting people
few in Iraq would venture to defend. One "executioner" told a reporter in May
that he and his fellow killers were tackling "a serious illness in the
community that has been spreading rapidly among the youth after it was brought
in from the outside by American soldiers. These are not the habits of Iraq or
our community and we must eliminate them." He added-implicitly trying to
counter one common complaint about the militias, that for years they had
delivered only violence and chaos into Iraqi lives: "Our aim is not to
destabilize the security situation. Our aim is to help stabilize society."[4]

If the killings were a bid for popularity, they may have
backfired. The grieving families found even among the Mahdi Army's core
communities in Sadr City lent no burnish to its image. In late May 2009, a
Sadrist spokesman gave an interview pointing to ongoing public meetings the
militia was holding to "fight the depravity and urge the community to reject"
homosexual conduct; but he added that "al-Sadr rejects" violence, and that
"anyone who commits violence against gays will not be considered as being one
of us."[5]
At the same time, however, another Sadrist leader proclaimed homosexuality "a
disaster that has come to the community," saying "We must correct the morals of
the nation."[6]
Human Rights Watch has received testimonies suggesting that in some areas Sunni
militias were also joining, possibly competitively, in the campaign of threats
and violence.

Iraqi police and security forces have done little to
investigate or halt the killings. Authorities have announced no arrests or
prosecutions; it is unlikely that any have occurred. While the government has
made well-publicized attempts since 2006 to purge key ministries of officials
with militia ties, including the Ministry of Interior, many Iraqis doubt both
its sincerity and its success. Most disturbingly, Human Rights Watch heard
accounts of police complicity in abuse-ranging from harassing "effeminate" men
at checkpoints, to possible abduction and extrajudicial killing.

Police certainly spread stories to the media that belittled
the murder campaign's scope, and tried to shift responsibility away from
militia death squads to family and tribal violence.[7]
"Honor"-and patriarchal and tribal values around masculinity, sexuality, and
shame-indeed exacerbate prejudice and incite harm, as Human Rights Watch
documents in this report. They do not, however, detract from the death squads'
culpability as chief actors. Nor do they diminish the state's unfulfilled
responsibility to investigate and prosecute murders, to punish those found
responsible, and to protect the rights and lives of all Iraqis, without
discrimination.

Human Rights Watch has previously reported on insurgent
violence against civilians in Iraq- as well as on the refugee crises that
violence produced, with hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqis forced to flee
their homes and country. This report does not contend that men suspected of
being "gay," or of being insufficiently "manly," face worse violence now than
many other Iraqis have in the past. However, the sharp spike in killings this
year points to lethal failures that persist, despite the Iraqi government's and
coalition authorities' self-congratulation on their supposed pacification of
society. In Iraq, armed groups still are free to persecute and kill based on
prejudice and hatred; the state still greets their depredations with impunity. The
attacks on the "third sex" and "gay" men may be only the first round in a
renewal of cycles of militia bloodshed. All Iraqis should be concerned about
such a revival of killings. It is incumbent on the Iraqi government to speak
out against it, and to stop it.

Many people have speculated, to Human Rights Watch or in the
press, that a fatwa or ruling on religious law by Moqtada al-Sadr or
another cleric had launched the campaign. A young man in Sadr City told an
Iraqi columnist that "the killing operations are not crimes since they fall
under the jurisdiction of a religious fatwa."[8]

Human Rights Watch was unable to find evidence that any
explicit, recent fatwa exists. In fact, however, the killings violate the
norms and procedural standards of shari'a law. It is true that the
Ja'fari school of Shi'ite jurisprudence, along with all four schools of Sunni
law, considers homosexual conduct between men (liwat) a crime. The
penalty applied to a person convicted of liwat can be a fixed
punishment (hadd), which may under certain circumstances extend to execution;
or it can be a discretionary measure (ta'zir), which may range from death
down to a warning. It is crucial to stress, however, that in either case Ja'fari
law lays out conditions which must be met before a sentence can be imposed. These
limitations are protections for privacy and reputation, and against arbitrary
trials.

Four conditions are relevant here.

High evidentiary standards are required.
Homosexual acts can only be established by a confession repeated four times[9];
by the unimpeachable testimony of four male witnesses (bayyina); or by
the judge's personal observation of the acts ('ilm al-hakim). If an
accusation of liwat turns out to be false, the accusers themselves are
punished as slanderers (qadhafa).[10]

The judge must determine that the defendant
is an adult, is capable of rational thought, and acted voluntarily.[11]

The judge must investigate whether
suspicious acts (such as sharing a bed) were the result of necessity, such as
lack of space.[12]

For execution to be imposed as a fixed punishment (hadd),
three additional tests must be passed.

Penetration must be proven:
the hadd cannot be imposed for non-penetrative acts. (This is
called the standard of iqab.)

The slightest doubt of guilt
must be eliminated, according to the legal principle of dar' al-hadd
bi-l-shubha ("fixed punishments are thwarted by doubt"). Ja'fari
jurists writing on the fixed punishment for liwat stress that the hadd
cannot be applied based on "possibilities" (la hadd ma'a al-ihtimal).[14]
Uncertainty about the good character of alleged witnesses to the act, or
discrepancies in their testimonies, should preclude a sentence.

The accused must be given a chance to repent, and
repentance can prevent a sentence of execution.[15]

The killings arbitrarily flout these limitations. Summary
executions, without trial, based on rumor and accompanied by torture, at the
hands of armed gangs-all these strike at shari'a standards of evidence,
legality, and justice.

They also strike at the principles of human rights. International
human rights law safeguards the right to privacy, including the right to an
intimate life undisturbed by surveillance or violence. It protects the right to
free expression, including the right to express one's personhood through dress
and behavior. It absolutely prohibits, in all circumstances, all forms of
torture and inhuman treatment. It guarantees the right to life, including the
right to effective state protection.

Iraq's leaders must be defenders of all its people. The
Iraqi state must desist from silence, and fully and immediately investigate the
murder and torture of people targeted because they do not correspond to norms
of "masculinity," or are suspected of homosexual conduct. It must appropriately
punish those found responsible. It must take effective steps to restrain
militia violence consistent with its own human rights obligations. It should
dismiss any police or criminal justice officials who are found responsible for
human rights abuses or who have been linked in the past to death squads or
militia forces. It should properly vet and train members of the police,
security forces, and criminal justice system, ensuring that trainings in human
rights include issues of sexual orientation and gender. Over the longer term,
the Iraqi government should establish and safeguard the rule of law, to ensure
that no Iraqi need fear extralegal punishment by armed men enforcing their own
prejudice and hatred.

The US and the US-led multinational forces in Iraq should
assist the Iraqi government wherever possible in investigating these crimes.
They should also end arbitrary detention without trial, including the arbitrary
detention of suspected militia members, and provide appropriate services to
released detainees to assist them to rejoin society, and ensure that they do
not resume violence.[16]

Finally, as many Iraqis targeted in the killing campaign are
forced to flee the country, the international community must recognize that they
are under threat not only at home, but in the surrounding countries where they
seek first refuge. As this report documents, nearly all those countries
criminalize consensual homosexual conduct; all have social environments of
severe prejudice. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and the
international community should prioritize prompt, and where necessary
accelerated, resettlement in safe third countries for those endangered people.

Methodology,
Terminology

This report is based primarily on research conducted in Iraq
from April 14-28, 2009 by Rasha Moumneh, researcher in the Middle East/North
Africa division of Human Rights Watch, and Scott Long, director of the Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights program at Human Rights Watch. During
that visit, we interviewed 22 Iraqi men face-to-face; they told us stories of
death threats, abductions, attempted assassinations and other forms of
persecution. We communicated with and interviewed 24 other men in Iraq by
telephone, e-mail, or internet chat. In July 2009, Scott Long interviewed an
additional eight Iraqi men in Lebanon. All the men we spoke to requested that
we not use their real names. We have concealed the locations in Iraq (and, in
some cases, outside Iraq) where interviews took place, to protect the safety of
these and others. Human Rights Watch also spoke to Iraqi human rights
activists, journalists, and medical doctors in the course of its research.

All the survivors of militia violence Human
Rights Watch interviewed for this report identified themselves as "gay." Some
reflection on terminology and identity is necessary here. The use of "gay" in
English to describe men who have emotional or sexual relationships with other
men is relatively recent, emerging out of a North American subculture in the
twentieth century. ("Homosexual" does not much predate it in European
languages; the term was coined by an Austro-Hungarian doctor in 1869.)

All the survivors we interviewed told us they
first heard "gay" with that purport after the US invasion in 2003. Most said it
had come to Iraq through the Internet or Western media, particularly TV and
films. Its use cuts across classes: a doctor and a high-school dropout each
employed it in talking to us about themselves. The men integrated the English
word seamlessly into Arabic speech. The recent deployment in Arabic of mithli
(plural mithliyeen) as a neutral, non-condemnatory equivalent of
"homosexual" in English has not taken strong root in Iraq. Most of the men, if
they were familiar with it at all, said it was rare.[17]
"All of us use 'gay' among ourselves, never mithli," a gay
hospital employee told us. "Even doctors in speaking to each other won't use
the Arabic word for it-they'll sometimes say 'homosexual' in English."[18]

It is vital to stress two points. First, the
fact that the word comes from beyond Iraq's borders does not point to
anything imported or foreign about the phenomenon people use it to
describe. To the contrary: the conduct called "homosexual"-desires, erotic
acts, or emotional relationships between people of the same sex- has always
existed in Iraqi society, as in all societies. A new name for it is, by itself,
only a shift in vocabulary, not in values or behavior.

Yet at the same time, no one should assume
that the word bears exactly the same connotations in Iraq as it does elsewhere.
That homosexual conduct has happened everywhere does not mean people interpret
it in the same way, or give it the same individual or collective meanings. In
fact, as Human Rights Watch has written:

No one receives an identity-social or
familial, as "son" or "chief," for instance-in pristine and
undiluted form from society or tradition; it always takes on personal and
internal meanings, as well as shadings from the social surroundings and the
historical moment. Similarly, people who identify as "homosexual" or
"gay" or "lesbian" in a cultural situation where the term
is new do not merely adopt an unbroken set of imported associations. They
creatively adapt the term and its meaning to their own conditions and their
cultural inheritance.[19]

Many gay Iraqis we interviewed implied that,
for them, having a "gay" identity is at least as much about how "masculine" or
"feminine" they see themselves as about the object of their desire. Gender-the
accumulated distinctions that societies and cultures impose, to demarcate what
is "proper" to men and to women-is an important axis along which they situate
their self-understanding.

Gender is also crucial to comprehending what
propels the current campaign of violence. It is telling, as suggested above, to
look at the words with which the Iraqi media and many ordinary Iraqis decry the
people who call themselves "gay." Some of these terms voice moral disapproval
predicated on certain specific kinds of conduct-such as luti or the
"people of Lot," taken from the Quranic story and applied to people who
practice liwat or "sodomy."[20]
Other, more demotic slurs, however, involve whether a man looks "masculine."
"The police at checkpoints always give us grief about our clothes, our
jewelry," one man said. "They call us kiki-it means someone who's
effeminate or soft."[21]
The notion that "gays" embody not just a propensity for certain sexual acts,
but a "third sex" threatening the other two, is rife. One newspaper article
implicitly applauded the killers by warning that "The legacy of inherited
beliefs regarding manhood and morality that characterize the Iraqi people must
be transmitted. These ideals go against the feminization of boys and the
practice of [men] applying makeup, which have spread among many Iraqi youth,
eliciting disgust."[22]
Enforcing manhood at gunpoint, the murderers arrogate to themselves the power
to control people's dress and appearance as well as their intimate lives. Men
wearing cologne or walking the wrong way become victims of the crackdown.

Fear of "feminized" men reveals only hatred of
women. No one should be killed for their looks or clothing. No one should be
assaulted or mutilated for the way they walk or style their hair. The freedom
to express oneself-in dress, appearance, and manner-is at stake in the
crackdown, as much as the security of the person and the protection of private
life. All these rights are essential to people's dignity.[23]

A glossary of some key terms can be found at the end of this
report.

II. "They Are
Massacring Us": Survivors' Voices

A Spreading Campaign

A campaign of systematic killings gathered gradually in
strength through the early months of 2009.

Militia attacks on men who look "effeminate," or who are
shadowed by suspicion of engaging in same-sex relations, have been an
intermittent aspect of the murderous climate in Iraq for at least five years.
Yet the people we interviewed testified to a radically new intensity to these
attacks this year-an expanded scope and reach of killings, and a monitory
public purpose: to enforce "morality," or a brutal perversion of it, through
murder.

Idris is 35 and a friend of Hamid. He has relationships with
other men but also has a wife and children. He told us in April:

We've been hearing about this, about gay men being killed,
for more than a month. It's like background noise now, every day. The stories
started spreading in February about this campaign against gay people by the
Mahdi Army: everyone was talking about it, I was hearing about it from my
straight friends. In a coffee shop in Karada they were talking about it; on the
streets in Harithiya they were talking about it. I didn't worry at first. My
friends and I, we look extremely masculine, there is nothing visibly "feminine"
about us. None of us ever, ever believed this would happen to us. But then at
the end of March we heard on the street that 30men had been killed already.[24]

Bilal, 27 years old, a street salesman in the Karada
neighborhood of Baghdad, says that he first sensed an atmosphere of mounting
danger when "A friend of mine was killed three months ago."

He was very public, everybody knew he was gay. His family
said his killers made a CD of how he was killed-they filmed it. They
slaughtered him; they cut his throat. His family did not want to talk about it.
And now they are killing people right and left in Shaab and al-Thawra. We heard
11 men were burned alive in al-Thawra. Everyone is talking about the numbers of
people killed. And they just keep rising. [25]

Hussein, 27 and from the Mansour district of Baghdad, told
us that, through the first months of the year, the violence metastasized from
target to target, running through a roster of supposed signs of nonconformity.
First "they went after people with long hair, so people got short haircuts
right and left. A friend of mine was threatened: he had long hair: he lived in
a Shi'a neighborhood, Abu Chir, next to Dora. Someone told him on the street
that he had to cut his hair or they would cut off his head."

Then people started gossiping, saying, there are guys who
wear sanitary pads to make their asses look bubblier-so anybody with tight
jeans was a target. And then you heard that tight T-shirts meant you were a
member of the third sex.

Everyone killed in the first period was in Shi'a
neighborhoods-Hurriya, al-Bada', Sadr City. But not anymore. For instance,
three days ago in my neighborhood, Hayy al-Jami'a, they found the body of a gay
man who was decapitated. The common talk about him in the neighborhood had
always been that he was gay. And this story spread like wildfire. It's a Sunni
district. But the way they operate now is, it seems, they go into a
neighborhood, kidnap someone, take him to Sadr City, and torture and kill him.
And then they dump the body in Sadr City, or back where he lived.[26]

Tariq, 18, who lived in Baghdad al-Jadida, a development in
the southeast part of the city, told Human Rights Watch,

At the end of March, I started to hear from friends that
the Mahdi Army was killing gays. The newspapers also reported there was an
increase in the "third sex" in Iraq, also known as "puppies" [jarawi].
Then on April 4, I found out that two of my gay friends, Mohammed and Mazen,
had been killed. I think those were their names; within a gay group, gays
rarely give out their real names. We were friends, we met in cafes or chatted
on the Internet, and one day they just disappeared.

A few days later, I met the brother of one of them and he
told me they were killed. They were kidnapped on the street and then their
bodies were found near a mosque, with signs of torture. One was 18, one was 19.

A couple of days after that, on April 6 or 7, I was in my parents' house, and
someone threw a letter at the door. I didn't see who. Inside the envelope was a
bullet. It had brown blood on it, and the letter said, "What are you still here
for? Are you ready to die?"

I think those two were tortured into giving my name,
because two days after I learned they were killed I got this threat. ... I
spoke by phone to a friend of mine yesterday night: he is also gay but he's
very masculine and no one knows about him. He said, "Get out if you can and
save yourself. They are killing gays left and right."

I said, "Who is doing it?" He said, "Everyone knows. Who do
you think? The Mahdi Army."[27]

Talal, 26, lives in an area bordering Sadr City. "I hear
people in the neighborhood talking about the issue," he told us, "and saying
these people need to be killed. Then I heard from friends in March that the
Mahdi Army had already killed 25 gay people in Sadr City. And in Mashtel
[another area in East Baghdad], 13 people. And in Palestine Street, 10."[28]

Atif, 27, from the Zayouna area of Baghdad, fled for
northern Iraq at the beginning of April. "I call people in Bagdhad and they
tell me, don't come back, they are massacring us: they are massacring gays
here." [29]

Death Lists

Hamid, who told us how armed militiamen kidnapped and murdered
his boyfriend, said:

In the same days around my partner's murder, they [militia
members] killed three other men within a few streets of each other, in Hurriya,
next to Kadhimiya, a very religious neighborhood. They
took two from their homes, including my boyfriend; they killed two more on the
street.

The next day, after my boyfriend was murdered, they came
for me. They came into my house and they saw my mother, and one of them said:
"Where's your faggot son?" There were five men. Their faces were covered.
Fortunately I wasn't there but my mother called me after they left, in tears.
From then on, I hid in a cheap hotel for two weeks. I can't face my family-they
would reject me. I can't go home.[30]

"The same day, a week after they came to Hamid's house," his
friend Idris says, "they came to mine."

They were in the same black outfits with masked faces. They
came in early evening. At the time, my wife and children and I were all at my
brother's house, because the electricity was cut. The next day, we came back
and found the house had been trashed, the windows smashed, and a lot of things
stolen. The neighbors said four or five men fitting the same description [as
those who came for Hamid] had come. The neighbors didn't know why: but I did. [31]

Majid, 25, another friend of Hamid, says,

They came to my parents' house a day
later. I was out of the house when it happened. The neighbor's son has the same
given name and so they kidnapped the wrong guy. When they found out they let
the boy go, but they beat him severely-they wanted to kill him. They tortured
him with electricity, they beat him with cables. He looked like a roast chicken
when he came home.

When I came back everyone was
yelling and screaming that Majid, this boy Majid, had been taken. When he was
released, he staggered home and said, "They didn't want me, they wanted the
other Majid. They said he was gay." I had to leave. My parents threw me out. I
cannot face them anymore.[32]

Cafes and gathering spots where gays discreetly met,
especially in Baghdad, have been a target of the crackdown. One journalist told
us in late April how "A week ago at a café in Karada, known to be frequented by
gay men, the militias threw a piece of paper in, for the owner, saying: 'If you
allow them to congregate here, we will blow up the café.'"[33]
These watering holes also furnish trails for the attackers to follow. Majid,
attacked at his home, says: "We think they got our names from the places where
we used to go-from the owners."

But anyway, in that neighborhood, if you ask around, people
will tell you their suspicions. And they kidnap people and torture them for
names-or for cell numbers. If they got my number off the phone of somebody they
tortured or killed, in Iraq it's very easy to trace the sim card.[34]

Several people told us that attackers had read them lists of
men suspected of sexual relations with other men. Haytham, 28, is a young professional
who has been in a relationship with his partner Adel, a 27-year-old student,
for almost a year. "Starting sometime in February we heard about gays being
murdered across Baghdad, especially in Sadr City. There was more and more talk
about it, among straight people as well as gays."

On April 1 these stories hit home: "I had been with Adel in
a café in Karada," Haytham recounted. "It was nighttime and we were on our way
back, driving through Shari'a Qanat"-an east Baghdad neighborhood near Sadr
City.

A car pulled us over. About six men carrying weapons
stepped out and asked for our IDs. They were dressed in black, which is usually
the sign of the Mahdi Army. I demanded, "Who are you to ask for our cards?" So
they opened the door and pulled us out, humiliating us, calling us "puppies,"
saying, "We see you in pervert places all the time."

I tried to argue we were just friends, tried to convince
them there was nothing between us. Then they pulled out a list and they started
asking us about these names.

Most were women's names, the nicknames of gay men. They
weren't names that either of us knew. At that point, a US [army] patrol car
came by. The men hissed at us: "Your turn is coming next." They threw us
against a wall, jumped in the car, and drove off.[35]

"After that I didn't leave the house for days," Haytham
remembers. He only went to his job after almost two weeks, to fill out
paperwork.

It was April 13 and I was driving on Qanat Street again, on
the way back from my workplace. Suddenly I saw another car was following me. It
was a car chase: I sped up and they sped up too. ... There were two men in the
car, and they kept staring at me. I couldn't see if they were armed or not, but
they were wearing black. They had pushed me over to the left side: if I
continued there I would crash into these concrete barriers that were part of
checkpoints. So I hit the brakes really hard before we reached the concrete
barriers. I swerved and was able to take a side street

The point is, they knew where I worked as well. The men
before had rifled through my wallet, so they'd seen my ID from my job: and
these men were following me from my workplace.[36]

Mashal is 41, and until recently owned a small store in the
Hayy Ur neighborhood. On March 6, militiamen kidnapped him for four days-and
tortured him to extract more names for their lists.

It was about 4 p.m. and four men came inside the shop. They
lingered and when I tried to get them to leave, they pulled out guns. They had
three cars-one a black Daewoo-and they put me in one and covered my eyes.

It was the Mahdi Army-they are the ones who operate in the
area. The place they took me to wasn't far away: it was very close to a mosque
or actually in the courtyard, because I could hear the call to prayer very clearly.
When they hauled me out of the car they beat me until I fell unconscious.

Late the next day, they came to me and said, "We know you
are gay, we know you're farakhji" [a derogatory term used in Iraq for
men who have sex with men]. They pulled out a list of names and started reading
them: you know these perverts, you know X and Y and Z. They gave the first name
and the neighborhood where he lived. I knew four who were still alive. One they
had already killed.

They had killed my friend Waleed in February, before I was
kidnapped. He was walking down a big street between Hayy Ur and al Shaab [in
northeast Baghdad near Sadr City] at dusk. I asked Waleed's brother about it
later, and he told me, "Waleed was slaughtered in the street. Don't ask more."
I am sure he was killed because he was gay. He was walking with a bunch of
straight friends, and he was killed, not them: he was the one they targeted.
He was the first name on the list they read me.

There were many more names I didn't know. I admitted knowing
those four, but I said it was only because they were customers in my shop.

They interrogated me for three hours that night. They kept
me blindfolded and gagged, and when they wanted me to speak, they took out the
gag. They demanded I give them names of other gays. At night they got a
broomstick, and they used it to rape me.

After that, they negotiated a ransom. They asked my family
for $50,000 USD. My brothers sold my shop, my car, everything I had to put
together half that.

When they let me go they said, "We have our sources, and we
know exactly what you do. If you step outside your house, you are dead." I
never left the house for more than a month, until I fled Baghdad. One of the
people whose names they read to me ran away from Baghdad, with his parents. Two
others I know are just hiding in their houses. A few don't answer their phones
and I don't know what has happened to them.[37]

Hussein told us that "These people-the Mahdi Army-go to
certain parties, to hunt down gay men." In mid-March, he says,

I went to a party in the Adhamiyah neighborhood. It's an
area full of Sunnis, but near a Shi'a neighborhood. The party was all men, but
mostly straight people; there was drinking and dancing. I am a good oriental
dancer, and I danced all evening. All through the night, I kept seeing people
in the crowd watching me, following with their eyes.

I left around 9 p.m. As I walked down the street, a black
Daewoo Prince was following me-three men in it, with short beards.

They had been at the party. I was the only one dancing
oriental style and it was very obvious I was gay. Oh, and they'd been drinking,
too! These people find it OK to kill. It's not like they won't find it OK to
sip a glass of wine.

One of them got out, and said, "Let us drop you off." From
the accent, I could tell they were Shi'a.[38] I started to back
off and they said more roughly, "Come with us." They insisted.

He grabbed me by the arm. I know these people, they look
for someone soft, like me. I pushed him away: then a second man came, grabbed
me, called me a son of a bitch, and pulled me into the car. I didn't know: were
they going to beat me, to rape me, to kill me? I said, "Let me out or I'll
start shouting"-the checkpoint was nearby. They were carrying guns and they
took them out, and one of them hit me in the head with the butt of his gun.

When we spoke to him, Hussein still carried a suppurating
wound on his forehead from the beating.

I started crying and they said, "We're going to fuck you."
They were driving really fast and I was sitting by the door; I started
struggling. They elbowed me, and I managed to get the door open and I rolled
out onto the street, by the concrete barriers. And they left me there, and I
woke up the next day; someone had dragged me to a hospital.

Hussein says: "The scar on my head is the sign: I'll be
killed. They hate me. I want to live."[39]

Torture and Threats: "A
Slaughterhouse on the Streets"

"Three were killed two days ago," the doctor, who identifies
as gay, told us in mid-April-"I heard it from a friend. I heard their bodies
were hung over a wall." He lives near Sadr City, and is almost but not quite
inured to the regular reports of gay men murdered in the area.

The same thing that used to happen to Sunnis and Shi'ites
is now happening to gays. Till now, my friends and I know of 10 or 15 who have
been killed, mostly around Sadr City. They sometimes get people in other
places, and bring them there to be killed. About two months ago it started. Day
after day they are more prominent. Now it is massive. At first they did it
secretly; but now they stop you-they stopped me this way-and search you on the
street, in front of others.

He fled Baghdad in mid-April, for his own safety. The
stories pursued him relentlessly, though: not just in his personal but in his
professional capacity. On April 18, he related to us:

A fellow doctor-a colleague, a classmate of mine, who works
at al-Kindi hospital-told me over the phone that more were killed yesterday.
Four were brought in with their genitals cut off. And some were brought in, not
dead, with glue in their anuses.[40]

A few days later, he said colleagues in Baghdad had warned
him "that bodies keep coming into the hospital. One day there were two bodies;
the next, four. Two or three of the dead bodies have glue up the anus. And
there are living people, a lot, who have been tortured badly, with bones
broken."[41]

Tayyib, 24, lived for several years with other men in a
"safe house" in Baghdad, funded by the London-based diasporic group Iraqi LGBT.
He says that of sixteen men he shared those quarters with, only nine are left:
the rest have been murdered or have disappeared. Friends and family told him
that "the Mahdi Army threw my friend Mustafa off the top of a building: then
they shot and killed him."Also in early 2009,

The Mahdi Army killed Khaldoun in Baghdad al-Jadida. I
heard that Khaldoun was tortured, beaten and disfigured, and finally hung on
the street. One of the tortures they used on him was a very strong glue to
close his anus, after which he was given a laxative causing diarrhea that
killed him.[42]

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the campaign is its
publicity and impunity. The death squads treat murder as a message, aimed at
other presumed "deviants" and at the population at large. The brutality of the
killings, the proliferation of mutilated corpses discarded in the trash, not
only conveys the power of the killers and the dispensability of the victims,
but makes the dead a savage example. Bodies-castrated, broken, tortured-become
billboards, on which punishment is less imposed than inscribed. As one man told
us, "It is a slaughterhouse on the streets."[43]

The excruciating killing of victims by injecting glue in
their anuses reached the press on April 19, in an al-Arabiya article
that quoted the Iraqi women's rights activist Yanar Mohammad
condemning "an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals."[44]
Other doctors in Baghdad confirmed the practice to Human Rights Watch.
One, at Chawader Hospital in Sadr City, told us that he had seen four men's
dead bodies brought to the hospital:

I knew one of them. One of the bodies was found in the
garbage in the Kasra wa Atash area and the others were found in several other
streets. .... Two of the bodies I saw were glued. I heard that happened in one
of the car workshops in Sadr City but I don't think there have been any
investigations.[45]

That is only one method, though, for staging a theater of
humiliation. Mashal said: "Friends told me that last week in separate incidents
they killed two guys, one from Sadr City, one from Ur-my area. They stripped
them naked and put diapers and bras on them. Then the Mahdi Army beat them to
death. They filmed at least one of the killings; I saw a video circulating via
Bluetooth."[46]

These stories reinforce an atmosphere of terror, and are
themselves reinforced by the videos of atrocity and insult that fly virally,
from mobile phone to mobile phone, throughout Iraq. Tariq told us, "Just
recently a new insult started, a new name for gays: jeru [puppy]. My
friend showed me a video on his mobile with a very effeminate man speaking and
it was dubbed with a puppy's barks. There are a lot of videos like this going
around."[47]

Fadi told us that, in his neighborhood near Sadr City, "I've
seen a poster on the wall: 'Stop the immoral and anti-Islamic acts of the
pervert homosexuals [mithliyeen], and mete out the appropriate divine
punishment.'"[48]
Similar signs have appeared in Najaf, the city that is home to the al-Sadr
family. A doctor said that names of men suspected of homosexual conduct had
been written on walls "in three different locations in Sadr city: Kasra wa
Atash, al-Fallah Street and the end of al-Dakhel Street."[49]Al-Arabiya
also alleged that public threats against named individuals had appeared in
the district:

A previously unknown group, Ahl al-Haq
(the People of Truth) has stepped up the persecution of Iraqi homosexuals [mithliyeen]
after several were murdered in recent days. Sources say that "Three lists, each
with the names of ten gay men, were circulated in Sadr City for a few hours."
The lists included a message: "Lecherous ones [fajireen], we will punish
you!"[50]

Fadi added that private threats are also part
of the repertory: "If they [the Mahdi Army] are not quite sure about
you, they say, 'You have to stop it or you will be killed.' If they are
confident, they just kill you." He relates,

A friend of mine, an engineer, was threatened directly. He
told me that they told him his family would be killed with him if he didn't
stop this. I haven't heard from him in ten days. ...

I have been threatened directly too. I became acquainted
with a person who is well known to be gay. I think then some people in the
neighborhood began to suspect that I might be gay too. Around April 12, I was
on the street and I saw some Mahdi Army thugs beating up a guy they were
accusing of being gay. They spotted me and they shouted: "We know you and we
will kill you next."[51]

Several people told us they had received death threats by
phone or in notes. Talal said, "Starting in December [2008] I began getting
text messages that had obscenities in them." Reluctant to say the words aloud,
he writes them instead: tanta ["queen" or effeminate man], firakh [boy].

And the messages would say, "We know you if we see you,"
"We know where your house is and we're going to come there," "If we see you, we
will kill you." And I got calls from random numbers saying the same thing.[52]

Bilal, a salesman in Karada, told us that "Three weeks ago I
was walking on the street, and a car pulled up to me. There were three young
men in the car, teenagers. They started making obscenities and following
me-'shame, shame, shazz [pervert], duda [worm].'"

When I go to my work, I am afraid. It is a gamble each time
I go. Two months ago, some guy came and was stalking me. He kept hanging around
the area where I work, giving me dirty looks-I was afraid I would be kidnapped
or killed.[53]

Bilal left Baghdad for another part of Iraq. In May, he
informed Human Rights Watch that someone sent his family a note saying that
"they" were waiting for him, and that he would be killed if he returned to his
Karada neighborhood.[54]

The threats extend beyond Baghdad. We spoke to two men who
had been in a relationship for five years; they lived in Najaf, the site of the
tomb of Imam Ali, one of the holiest places of Shi'ite Islam. It is also a home
of Moqtada al-Sadr, and a city dominated by the Mahdi Army. Ja'far, 41, had
owned a shop near the mosque of Ali. When we met him, he was so traumatized by
months of harassment and abuse that he could not leave his room and could
barely talk. His partner Mohammed, 34, told most of his story.

"They did many things to us, the Mahdi Army," Mohammed said:

It started in October 2008. Men came into Ja'far's shop and
offered him a drugged drink or candy. When he started to drive home with his
earnings, one of them got in the car with him, and he was too drugged to stop
them; they kidnapped him, beat him, and stole all he was carrying-tens of
thousands of dollars. He disappeared for days; he won't say what happened to
him. I didn't see him until two weeks after and there was still a bloody scar
on his head from the beatings.

Another time they kidnapped him for six days. He will not
talk about what they did to him. There were bruises on his side as if he was
dragged on the street. They did things to him he can't describe, even to me.

They wrote in the dust on the windshield of his car: "Death
to the people of Lot and to collaborators." They sent us veiled threats in text
messages: "You are on the list." They sent Ja'far a piece of paper in an
envelope, to his home: there were three bullets wrapped in plastic, of
different size. The note said, "Which one do you want in your heart?"

I know who they are. The envelope came from the Mahdi
Army's technical expert in Najaf-he does their websites. One day he met me on
the street and asked me, "Did you receive my gift?"

I want to be a regular person, lead a normal life, walk
around the city, drink coffee on the street. But because of who I am, I can't.
There is no way out.[55]

Mustafa, 37, told us that in early 2009 in his home city of
Basra, a militia member entrapped him in a bathhouse:

There is a hamam [bath] in Basra that gays frequent.
I entered, but I was very careful how I looked and acted. I took a shower, and
then this man approached me. He started talking about the situation in Iraq:
how people should be more open, accept changes and change with them. He was
very clever in his questions!

He asked if I watched satellite TV. I said yes. He asked if
I watched the European channels. I denied that I did.[56]
He said, "The Internet is a good thing; it is good that it came to our
country." He asked what websites I visited. I just said, various ones. He asked
if I went to porn sites. I denied it. Then he asked if I used Manjam [a
personals site popular among gay men]. He was very smart: that website is only
known among the gays, I thought. When he said that, I trusted him; I admitted
it.

He smiled for a couple of minutes, a very neutral, slick
smile, just looking at me. Then he grabbed me by the hair and started beating
me, shouting, "You are gays." That was how he said it: gays. He dragged
me out of the shower; I begged him to let me put my clothes on, and he let me
dress, but then he dragged me onto the street, shouting "You sodomite!" [Enta
luti ].

People gathered around us while he was hitting me, and
tried to interfere. They said, "How do you know he is a sodomite? Did you see
him practicing liwat?" The man said, "I have my own ways of finding
out!" I was begging them to help, and while they were trying to reason with
him, I took advantage of the confusion and ran away. We were on a narrow,
winding street; I must have run 300 meters before I reached a shop where they
sell rope. I shouted dakhilak [a cry for asylum]. The owner let me hide
in his shop.

He put me in the cellar, but even there I could hear the
man shouting, "Where is he?" and other voices joining him. Two hours later, the
owner told me he had to close the shop. He said the man was from the Mahdi Army
and the militia was searching for me up and down the street. I pleaded with him
to let me stay overnight, and so he shuttered the shop up and let me hide
there. In the morning, after dawn prayer, he came and said it was safe and I
ran away.[57]

Hanif, 25, fled Basra in April because of an atmosphere of
vigilante menace. Two weeks later, his mother got a note addressed to him,
reading:

Message to one of Basra's puppies

Know that the shari'a law will be executed on you
and it is our duty to carry it out quickly

No matter when you disappear, the compensation [thawab]
we will get from killing you will be ours

Another man, from Kirkuk, told us that Sunni militias had
threatened him there in April 2009.

They had some suspicion about my behavior and my clothes,
and they were always watching me till one night when they stoppedme in
the street when I came back from work to my home at night. They called me bad
things and names (tanta and firakh)and threatened me with
guns. They told me to change my way of dressing and my voice and never meet any
one, and they told me that they know what I am, and one of them hit me on my
face. Because of that I left my work and the city.[59]

III. Extortion and the
State: Nuri's Story

Consensual homosexual conduct between adults is not a crime
under Iraqi law. The 1969 Criminal Code, still in force, expressly mentions
homosexual conduct only in paragraph 393, titled "Rape, Homosexual Acts (Liwat)
and Assault on Women's Honor (Hatk el 'Ard)." Despite the heading,
however, the article is an attempt at a gender-neutral rape law. Its substance
reads:

Any person who has sexual relations with a woman against
her consent or has homosexual relations with a man or a woman without his or
her consent is punishable by life imprisonment or temporary imprisonment.[60]

Some sweeping and unspecific provisions in the criminal code
give police and prosecutors broad scope to punish people whose looks, speech,
or conduct they simply dislike.

Paragraph 401 punishes "Any
person who commits an immodest act" [fi'lan moukhillan bil haya] in
public with up to six months in prison.

Paragraph 402 punishes "any
person who makes indecent advances to another man or woman" [man talab
oumouran moukhalifa lil aadab] with up to three months in prison.

Paragraph 501
punishes "any person who washes themselves in a city, town or village in
an indecent manner or appears in a public place in an indecent state of
undress" by up to 10 days' detention or a fine.

Paragraph 502 imposes
the same punishment on "any person who loiters in a public place or
observes such a place with indecent intent or for an indecent purpose."

Other provisions could be enlisted to restrict freedoms of
expression, association, and assembly, or to penalize human rights defenders
who take up unpopular issues.

Paragraph 200
(2) punishes with up to seven years' imprisonment anyone who promotes any
"movement" that seeks to "change the fundamental principles of the
constitution or the basic laws of society."

Paragraph 210
prohibits disseminating any information or idea that, among other things,
"disturbs the public peace."

Paragraphs 403 and 404 permit
prison terms (up to two years under the first paragraph, up to one year
under the second) for "obscene or indecent" publication or speech. [61]

Kurdish Regional Government prosecutors have
used paragraph 403 against publicly raising issues of homosexuality. On
November 24, 2008 an Erbil court sentenced Adel Hussein, a doctor as well as
freelance journalist, to six months' imprisonment for indecent expression,
because two years earlier he had published an article in the independent weekly
Hawlati about health issues for men who have sex with other men.[62]

Where the rule of law has neither respect nor reach, however,
the letter of legal provisions is largely irrelevant. Many police may be
ignorant of exactly what the law permits or proscribes. In April 2009, the New
York Times quoted an officer at a Karada police station in Baghdad as
saying "Homosexuality is against the law. And it's disgusting." He claimed
that, for four months, the police had waged a "campaign to clean up the streets
and get the beggars and homosexuals off them."[63]

Meanwhile, prejudice and corruption drive police repression
even in the absence of legal justification. Several people told Human Rights
Watch they had witnessed police harassing or beating "effeminate" men. "About
four months ago in the Bab Sharqi neighborhood [of Baghdad]," one journalist
said, "on the way to work I personally saw the police rounding up four
'she-males' and being very physically abusive to them-pulling their hair,
kicking them, and throwing them into the back of a police van."[64]

Iraqis we interviewed accuse the police of turning a blind
eye to, or colluding with, militia violence. Mashal, kidnapped by militias in
April 2009, says, "There was a police patrol right next to my store when they
kidnapped me; they saw everything that was happening, but they didn't
intervene. Everyone believes the police [in the area] are under the control of
the Mahdi Army."[65]

Most importantly, as one man remarked to us, "Police look at
gay people and they see money."[66]
A military officer told Human Rights Watch that "Through my contacts in both
the military and the Ministry of Interior, I have seen incredible examples of
administrative corruption. They will do anything, destroy anybody, to get their
hands on some money-through threats, extortion, torture. And gay men are
especially easy for them to blackmail."[67]

One young man told us a story in which official corruption
and brutality intertwine. In early 2009, as the broader militia campaign was
getting underway, Ministry of Interior officers kidnapped and tortured him in a
murderous shakedown, to extort money because they knew he worked with an LGBT
organization abroad. He paid and escaped. He says he saw the bodies of five
men killed because they could not pay.

Nuri, 21 and born in Baghdad, had gotten in touch with the
London organization Iraqi LGBT when he was 17. In the succeeding years, on
their behalf, he rented and ran two homes in Baghdad; these served as "safe
houses" for mostly-young men who had been thrown out by their families or faced
violence on the streets because they were "effeminate," or suspected of sex
with other men. The London group periodically sent him small sums to maintain
the houses, and that inevitably drew the authorities' attention. "One day in
February 2009," he says,

I was in a taxi in the middle of Karada when special police
[maghawir] stopped the car, asked me for my ID, and searched me. They
took my phone and my wallet, and handcuffed me. They put a bag over my head,
hit me and put me in a car. They took me to the Ministry of Interior.

Once we got there, I heard them talking on a walkie-talkie:
they were telling people from the intelligence service what had happened.

They put me in a room, a regular room, took the bag off my
head, and there I was with five other gay men. I didn't know them previously,
but I found out we had mutual friends. They gave their female names but not
their real names. Gay men in Iraq are very cautious that way.

Then two hours later, they separated us and put each in a
room. After they separated us, I didn't know anything about the fate of the
other five men. And then a police officer came and said. "Do you know where
you are? You are in the interrogation wing of the Ministry of Interior." He
told me, "If you have ten thousand US dollars, we will let you go."

I said I didn't have that kind of money.

The next day at 10 a.m., they cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they tied a
rope around my legs, and they hung me upside down from a hook in the ceiling,
from morning till sunset. I passed out. I was stripped down to my underwear
while I hung upside down. They cut me down that night, but they gave me no
water or food.[68]

"I was kept in a solitary cell," Nuri says:

It was a little over two meters high: I could reach the
ceiling. There was no space for me to lie down. I had to sleep semi-standing.
It was like a metal box.

Next day, they told me to put my clothes back on and they
took me to the investigating officer. He said, "You like that? We're going to
do that to you more and more, until you confess." Confess to what? I asked. "To
the work you do, to the organization you belong to, and that you are a tanta"
[queen].

"The officers talked about religion," Nuri says, "that what
I did was against religion. Whenever they brought up religion they would get
really aggravated and beat me more." But he adds that money was foremost on
their minds. "They knew the name 'Iraqi LGBT'-and they knew it helped mithliyeen
financially. They knew about the safe houses. All they wanted to know was,
'Who's paying? And why are they helping you?'"

When I was questioned, they said, "You have to confess." And I said, I have
nothing to confess. Then they showed me a police report. I read it and it
showed everything about me from 2005 until the day I was arrested. ... They
knew personal details, through gay informants. And then they took me into another
room, and began torturing me again.

There were guards in army uniforms all over the Ministry
building, but those who interrogated me were wearing civilian clothes. During
the "business hours" they had official uniforms; but these investigations all
happened after 3 p.m. when the offices closed. The interrogations were very
violent: I guess they didn't want people screaming while people were visiting
the building.

For days there were severe beatings, and constant
humiliation and insults. I was in prison 25 days and the torture lasted 25
days. They were nine in all, working in groups of three, and every day they
changed the group of three. Every day there was a ranking officer, and two of
a lower rank. The three would torture me every day, for four or five hours.

It was the same form of abuse every day. They beat me all
over my body; when they had me hanging upside down, they used me like a
punching bag. That happened every day. Now I have a migraine because I spent so
much time upside down. I have tremors, headaches. They used electric prods all
over my body.

Then they raped me. Over three days. It was toward the end of the period. The
first day, fifteen of them raped me; the second day, six; the third day, four.
There was a bag on my head every time.

Nuri, sobbing, showed us scars
above his hands. "I tried to cut my wrists with a plastic spoon after the
rapes."

There was one officer among the nine who tried to help. He
was part of the torture team. But he said he had avoided sending the police report
on me to the judge who he said would pass the sentence. He told me he would
save my life if I gave him a five thousand dollar bribe.

One day, they took me up to the top floor, where there was
a little window, straight onto the courtyard. They gave me binoculars to look.
I could see: there were the five men from the cell when I was first arrested.
They were lying dead. They'd been executed.

Then they showed me a piece of paper and said it was the
court order for their execution. I said, give me the phone. And I called my
friend in London.[69]

The friend in London sent money to an acquaintance of Nuri
in Baghdad, who gave it to the officer.

After that, at 3 a.m. one night, the officer came and gave
me army fatigues, and a head mask-a baklava where you could only see my eyes.
There are rotations of guards, where some come and go, and I escaped by leaving
with the soldiers-I was limping because of the torture but he showed me how to
walk like a soldier so I couldn't be suspected. He took me out and put me in
the trunk of a car and dropped me off on some road on the edges of the city. I
walked for three hours after that.

When he asked me for a bribe, I thought
he would take it and kill me. I didn't believe I was going to live until I got
out of the trunk of the car.

IV. Pretext and Context: Moral Panic, Political
Opportunism

The militia killings beginning in early 2009 invoke morality
as a cause. In fact, though, they have sunk a taproot into a deeper stream of
social anxieties about "traditional" values and cultural change. These fears,
springing up in the daily press as well as in Friday sermons, center around
gender-particularly the idea that men are becoming less "manly," failing tests
of customary masculinity.

Stanley Cohen, a British sociologist, wrote almost forty
years ago that "Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods
of moral panic," irrational surges of fear when "A condition, episode, person
or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values
and interests." In such moments, deep uncertainties about rapid change gather
to a head, with a strength that sidelines the usual processes-political or
civic or personal-through which those communities can debate or settle their
stresses. People look for scapegoats: not just to explain, but to incarnate the
unsettling transmutations around them, shifts that they cannot fully articulate
but are determined to stop. [70]

Cohen calls moral panics "condensed political struggles to
control the means of cultural reproduction."[71] In simpler terms:
they are battles to define who belongs in a community and who does not. The
confrontations are waged with the weapons of opinion, in newspaper columns and
places of worship-and sometimes with the tools of lynching, the noose and the
gun. The murders in Iraq point to such a complex of fears.

In May 2009, while the killing campaign was at its height,
the Iraqi magazine Al-Esbuyia acknowledged that "kidnappers" were
targeting mithliyeen or homosexuals. However, the journal blamed not the
murderers but the "puppies," men who do not act like men.

A wave of feminization is sweeping Baghdad neighborhoods,
turning young men into women or approximations of women through imitating the
opposite sex. They are homosexuals [mithliyeen] or jarawi (the
local term for faggots [mukhanatheen]), and they suffer at the hands of
squads that hunt them down and kill them. In most cases, the police stand by
and do nothing ...

In Sadr City, we looked for puppies without success. One of
[Sadr City]'s residents, Ali Hassan ... claims that this month has been witness
to events that changed many things, the first of which was young men giving up
the fashion of wearing tight clothes, growing their hair and removing it from
their faces. Everyone says that there are special squads or groups that kill
anyone who uses face whitening creams, and pharmacies have emptied their stocks
of female hormones that were plentiful in the past period. Ali insists that he
has not seen any acts of violence, but there are very strong rumors of the
existence of groups that keep tabs on men who use female hormones, use face
whitening creams, or wear their hair long, so that they may kidnap them from
their homes late at night. ...

Yaser Hameed, a coffee shop owner in Bab al-Mo'them, kicks
out anyone he suspects of being of "those types." He also forbids his sons from
buying strange clothes that have proliferated in the market, such as tight
shirts and tight, low-waisted pants. He sees these things as indicative of
moral decline.

Baha' Ja'afar, a social science professor at the University
of Baghdad, says: "This phenomenon of behavioral social change is of two types:
the first is deliberate and political, and the second is arbitrary, caused by
the hybridization of cultures and the loss of their moral ideals in favor of
politics, personal interest, and power. One of the negative consequences of the
intertwining of religion into the quagmires of politics and power struggles and
armed conflict is that a lot of social groups turn to these types of behaviors
after being let down and feeling disillusioned and disappointed." The professor
has noticed a change in students from roughness to an exaggerated softness to
the extent that he sometimes has difficulty telling his male students from his
female ones. Unless these behaviors are stopped, he expects them to become
entrenched in society. The problem is that there are no laws prohibiting these
deviant phenomena, and there is no legal text specifically prohibiting men from
imitating women or vice versa, particularly in terms of outward appearance.[72]

Similarly, Al-Sabah newspaper warned in May about
"The Feminization of Young Men: Diagnosis and Treatment," claiming that
effeminacy "has become evident in cities where sexual perverts [shazooz]
engage in it":

Moral responsibility rests upon scientists, teachers,
scholars, intellectuals, and parents in collaboration with secondary school
authorities, social workers, counselors, psychologists, and mentors. ...
Globalization in fashion and subtitled sitcoms and soap operas have a strong
influence on young people, who try to emulate what they see in terms of dress,
actions, and fashion.

However, the religious outlook and moral values traditional
to Arab society must reach across generations. .... These ideals go against the
feminization of boys and the practice of [men] applying makeup, which have
spread among many Iraqi youth, eliciting disgust. They result in an unhealthy
society lacking prosperity in terms of its culture, economy, and scientific
knowledge, leading to lower levels of education and intellect.[73]

A sudden spike within a month in the prevalence of men
wearing hair below the shoulders is unlikely. Many of the men we spoke with
told us, however, that the ebb of violence in the last two years had, over
time, allowed gay-identified men greater visibility as well as safety. One
said:

Since 2006, gays started becoming a bit more relaxed; it
was still very underground and super secret, but you could meet through the
Internet, and you had some cafes; you had some semblance of a gay life. Of
course if anyone found out about you, you were in big trouble, with stigma for
life; but you could meet without being killed. Then last month, things got bad.[74]

A military officer told us that "I have heard other officers
talking about what is behind this specific campaign. About a year ago, when the
violence was a bit subdued and security was more or less under control, gay
men, especially effeminate ones, started going out to cafes in groups and being
obviously gay. I heard there was a lot of anger over it, and this is one of the
things that sparked the recent campaign."[75]

Technology helped spread the panic over "effeminate" men.
Videos of one particular incident may have been especially virulent in their
effects. "In the summer of 2008," Nuri says, "there was a big gay party in
Palestine Street in Baghdad. There was a lot of dancing, and drag as well: it
was very obviously a gay party. And people started filming the party on their
mobile phones. And it spread by Bluetooth and onto CDs that were sold in
various places around Baghdad: especially Sadr City."[76]
Human Rights Watch obtained two such videos, showing men dancing together at
the party. A journalist told us that since early 2009, "gay pictures or videos
have been cropping up very quickly. People would take pictures of 'she-males'
on mobile phones and they would go from phone to phone like crazy."[77]

Friday sermons at Shi'ite mosques, particularly those
associated with al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army, began condemning an intractable
"effeminacy" among men in early 2009. Haytham says, "I've personally heard
sermons preached, starting about a month ago, in the mosque in Baghdad
al-Jadida, which is heavily influenced by al-Sadr. They say, 'This is bad and
sinful'; they don't say kill them specifically, but they say, 'We need to end
this phenomenon.' Almost every week they include something on this in their
sermons now."[78]

In the Baghdad neighborhood of Nahrwan, Talal told us, "it's
been a constant subject of debate. Religious people and militias hold meetings
there and talk about this issue, the need to control sodomy and the people of
Lot." In one local school in early April, he says, "The Mahdi Army people came
in, and talked to the teachers and the administrators, and then held a meeting
for the whole school saying, 'We need to control this phenomenon.' A friend of
mine who is a teacher there told me about it. The local municipality itself
organized this meeting!"[79]

The panic and the killing focus as much on how one looks and
dresses-whether or not men seem "masculine" enough-as on imputations about what
ones does in bed. Moreover, in a country plunged into poverty over the last
twenty years, resentments around class intertwine with rigid requirements about
gender. Many people stressed to us that decadence-not just femininity but an
aura of possessions or privilege-is one of the stereotypes about the "third
sex."

The lethal myths about what alien habits look like have
forced close self-scrutiny on many people in recent months. "Why do they target
me?" Hussein asked himself. He had spent his last few dinars on a box of
cigarettes; he was still conscious that, to some fellow Iraqis, he looked rich
enough to kill. "A lot of it also has to do with my appearance-looking neat,
dressing carefully. If the Mahdi Army saw I had a gold earring or long hair,
they would slaughter me. Look at me: I've cut my hair short. Yet if I walked
out in Baghdad even now, for an hour, I would be killed."

What makes people think you are gay? If I make my hair
spiky or gel it-many people say that's it. If I wear a tight T-shirt or a tank
top. If I wear a single bit of jewelry or gold. ... It's class hatred in
certain ways. The men they target wear nice clothes, express themselves nicely.
It's resentment against those they see as privileged. ... For example, if you
are wearing cologne, the first thing you get asked is, "Where did you get the
money to buy this?" If I say-and it's true-I don't eat for three days so that I
can buy the cologne, or afford this T-shirt, it only makes them angrier.

Gay people are an easy target. They have no social support,
and they are obvious to pick out. Those people can pour their class resentment
into targeting these men. They become a focus.[80]

Many suggested to us that the Mahdi Army see the "third sex"
as not just an easy target, but a useful one. Underneath moral opprobrium,
political opportunism feeds.

After taking a visible lead in purging Baghdad neighborhoods
of Sunnis during the near-civil-war of 2004-2006, the Mahdi Army cannily
declined to confront US forces openly during the troop surge that began in
2007. Its forces hid their arms and blended back into their neighborhoods. For
practical purposes, the formerly omnipresent militia disappeared. Preserving
its strength through a strategic stand-down, however, came at a cost to its
public image of intransigence. Rumors that Moqtada al-Sadr (whose vehement
Iraqi nationalism was a family inheritance) had not only retreated from the
American army but sought refuge in Iran worsened the damage.[81] A
doctor we talked to speculated that the campaign started because the Mahdi Army
"have no authority on the street: so they want to use this as a way to restore
their credibility."[82]

Homosexuality "has spread because of the absence of the
Mahdi Army, the spread of sexual films and satellite television and a lack of
government surveillance," Sheikh Ibrahim al-Gharawi, a Shi'ite cleric from
the militia's office in Sadr City, told a Western news service in April when
asked about the killings.[83]
His message was clear: the militia is back, its involuntary truancy led to
burgeoning moral lapses, and its renewed services are needed to reinstitute a
moral rigor the state cannot supply. Cleansing Iraq of people few would care
openly to defend gives the militia a revitalized sheen of incontrovertibly
urgent purpose. "Now they are done with the Sunni and Shi'a thing," Hussein
says of the al-Sadr forces. "So they have a new thing, that's the gay thing ...
They have found someone new to kill."[84]

A journalist commented, "The Mahdi Army no longer have a
clear project. Getting rid of the Sunnis and the Americans is less important,
so they are turning to other targets." He adds,

A lot of the Mahdi Army are not there because they are
religious. I know militiamen who drink, take drugs, have sex. They are there
because their hearts are dead. They can just kill people without thinking
twice.

They are products of violence and they pass it along. They
learned violence from poverty and from the time of Saddam, and it's all they
know.[85]

For the militias, the killing campaign is arguably a
political tool. For the individual killers, many of whom are likely from the
ranks of the most desperate and dispossessed, it gives them unchecked authority
over the intimate and vulnerable aspects of others' existence.

"There is nothing you can hide in Iraq," Hamid, whose
partner was kidnapped and killed, said. "Anything about you can become public
knowledge."[86]
Wahid explained that Iraq has experienced "a constant invasion of people's
privacy: by militias, by political forces, by everyone-to the extent that if a
man is Shi'ite and his wife is Sunni, they will force him to divorce, just to
control them. There's a desire to invade and dominate every part of people's
lives."[87]

Hussein summed it up:

This is how it spreads: the killing gives people power over
other people. If anybody suspects I am gay, they can get anything from me:
money, sex, whatever. And if they want something from anybody, they can say,
"You are gay."

The campaign and the fear become something you can use
against anybody, for pure power.[88]

V. Family, Gender,
"Honor"

Idris, whom militiamen tried to kidnap and kill, told us
that "I come from a tribal family. And my fear is from them even more than the
militias."[89]
His friend Majid, whose parents and neighbors learned he was gay when the
militia invaded his home, says, "If I am safe from the Mahdi Army, I will never
be safe from my family-never. They will kill me right away."[90]

If a diffuse anxiety over endangered masculinity perturbs
mosques and media alike, the pressure to "be a man" begins at home. Violence
enforces it. Many we spoke with pointed to the intense patriarchal values of
tribal structures, in which each member's conduct can inflect the status of the
entire extended unit. A 25-year old professional from Baghdad said hesitantly,

My father is the head of the tribe, and he started spying
on me and reading my text messages on my phone, and listening whenever was on
the phone. He got more suspicious, and he beat me up. ... My brother told me,
"If our father finds proof you are a pervert he will kill you immediately." We
are a tribal family: it is completely unacceptable.[91]

Under Saddam Hussein-and especially in the regime's crisis
years after 1991-the government fostered tribal hierarchies, augmenting their
authority and legal status in the hopes that clan heads could seal and deliver
their members' loyalties. The state gave tribal sheikhs power to settle disputes
and decide internal affairs, in what some called a "retribalization" of Iraq.[92]
The impoverishment of a once-prosperous society in the 1990s by Western
sanctions, and the implosion of security after the 2003 invasion, both
compounded the renascence of tribalism. They compelled much of the population
to rely on blood connections for subsistence, patronage, and protection. Tribal
ties have become not just a material requirement but, in the process, a key
psychological component of identity for many Iraqis. Outside their rural
heartlands, they define the terms of urban life: Ali Allawi estimates that "up
to 164 different tribes and clans," and over 300 local tribal leaders, were
represented in the vast slum of Sadr City after Saddam's fall. Broader, sectarian-identified
and cross-tribal forces like the militias had to find ways to co-opt or
cooperate with tribal structures, even while seeing them as competing centers
of authority.[93]
Signs suggest that the Mahdi Army may have curried tribal leaders' favor in embarking
on its morality campaign. A Sadrist-affiliated "executioner" told a reporter
in May 2009 that "We had approval from the main Iraqi tribes here [in the Shaab
area of Baghdad] to liquidate those [men] copying the ways of women."[94]

Saddam's regurgitated version of tribal legal principles
took possibly its most damaging form in 1991, when he amended the Criminal Code
to read (in paragraph 128) that "The commission of an offence with honorable
motives or in response to unjustified and serious provocation by a victim of an
offence is considered a mitigating excuse."[95] This provision is
still in place.[96]

As in many other countries, so-called "honor crimes" thus
have a privileged status in Iraqi penal law. Worldwide, such crimes typically
take the form of violence against women, including murder, motivated and
justified because she has "dishonored" the male members of her family.
Standards of "honor" almost always include norms of sexual purity: women who
have sex, or are believed to have sex, with men before or outside marriage
violate them. There are other ways, however, in which women can endanger the
status and reputation of parents or husbands. Dressing or walking the wrong way
can subtly infringe against gendered expectations for how women should behave.

Despite wide acknowledgement that violence against women is
a serious crisis in Iraq, state authorities have ignored it, and most NGOs have
concentrated on "public," political patterns of attacks on men.[97] Amid
this neglect, the question of whether and how violence targets women for non-heterosexual
behaviors has been doubly neglected. In researching this report, Human
Rights Watch was unable to locate or interview women in Iraq who have
experienced intimate or sexual relationships with other women. The pressures to
marry and to conform make those women invisible. Only anecdotal accounts
suggest what they might face. Mashal, for example, told us:

I heard about one girl-her cousin killed her at the
entrance of her house because she is a lesbian. He cut her throat the same way
you would slaughter a sheep. He opened the door so people could see the body, a
public show of cleansing. I know someone who saw it.[98]

Men, however, also bear the "honor" of their families and
tribes. Human Rights Watch heard testimonies from Iraqi men who faced violence
or murder because they were not "manly" enough, incurring shame on the whole
extended household. These stories suggest the importance of treating "honor" as
an issue, and an incitement to rights violations, that cuts across genders.
They also show how urgent it is to investigate gender-based violence and honor
crimes in Iraq in all their forms-including the unexplored area of attacks
against women suspected of sex with other women, or women whose dress or
bearing brand them as not "feminine."

Punishments for not being "man" enough start when young.
"Since I was 12, my father and my brothers beat and insulted me for my feminine
appearance and behavior," Tayyib, 24, from Baghdad, told us. "My father beat me
all the time, and he also burned my hands and arms with heated metal. My
brothers would beat me up whenever they saw me playing with girls, for example.
My mother tried to protect me, but she couldn't do anything to stop it."[99]

Ramiz, 30, who grew up in the southern city of Amara, left
first his home town and then the country after years of family violence:

From the time I was very little, my family knew I was
different. I had artistic inclinations; I liked to write and draw and design
fashions. Because of this, I was always severely insulted and abused at home,
especially by my two older brothers. They beat me about it all the time, to
control what I could do. They would tell me, "You are a failure at everything:
you will never be anything." My middle brother, older than me, was especially
cruel. Several times he pulled a machine gun on me.

It gets to you, it gets inside you, but I managed to hold
myself together. Before the [2003] war, I knew of a lot of abuse of gay men
that happened in families. But there were no killings that I heard of; the
regime was very severe for people who committed murder.

In Amara in 2003, immediately after the war, two gay
friends of mine were killed in honor killings by their families, and the police
were paid to keep quiet. My fears got to the point where I had a nervous
breakdown. ... Now my mother is the only person I'm in contact with. I have no
contact at all with the rest of my family. [100]

Mu'ayyad was born in Baghdad. Although his parents have
lived and worked abroad since his early youth, he pursued his studies in Iraq
from elementary school through medical school. We spoke to him in another
country in the region after he escaped his homeland. "All through my
childhood," he told us, "people would call me a sissy, a faggot, even though I
cut my hair short and changed the way I walk. They hated the way I talked, they
hated everything about me, and I had no friends."

My uncles on my father's side despised me. ... They used to
put me in the middle of the living room and make jokes about me: "See how he
looks, see how he holds his head!" I begged my mother to get me out, to take me
to where she lived. She said, "Iraq is a manly society and maybe they'll make
you a man."

I lost interest in life. My uncles on my father's side are
heads of the tribe; they told me I shamed the tribe because I was not a man. I
would bring them gifts and try to make them like me, and they would put me on a
chair in the garden and not let me go inside.

Then I met a man and I thought he loved me. I gave him my
all.

After four years, suddenly he turned evil, and started to
blackmail me, demanding more and more money. He told me: "If you don't pay up,
I will use the pictures I have of you." He said, "I know where all your uncles
live." I thought it was a sick joke.

One day, in mid-2007, we had a quarrel. And later that day
my sister called me downstairs. She was shaking; I will never forget her face.
She said, "I have just gotten a call from your aunt"-one of my uncles' wives.
"All your family is meeting at your oldest uncle's house."

Each of my uncles had found a CD with a paper under his
door. The CD had pictures of me with my lover, kissing and hugging, that made
clear I was gay. The paper said that I was one of the biggest gays in Baghdad,
and that everywhere I went with gays I used my tribe's name and told people I
was so proud to be a member. And it said, "See the shame he has brought you."

My uncle's wife liked me a little bit. She told my sister
that my uncles were deciding how to kill the shame. They wanted to take me to a
small town north of Baghdad; they were discussing who would start the work of
slaughtering me in public there.

I was crying. My sister said, "There is no time to talk.
I'd want you to be anywhere else rather than see your name on a grave." I took
only the most important things I had and some money. ... My uncle's
neighborhood was far away and they needed to cross lots of checkpoints to reach
me. I had time to escape.

Mu'ayyad fled to a neighboring country, where he was able to
use his medical education to get a hospital job.

My parents knew about the crisis but my sister, who felt I
was sick and couldn't help it, persuaded them that the CD was faked. ... But my
dad cannot stop my uncles at all. It is a matter of shame. And in Iraq if
anything is between two lips, it will be between two thousand. Scandal always
spreads; my uncles know if I set foot in Iraq, they will not be man enough to
head the tribe.

For the next six months, I was interning in a hospital, and
I thought I was safe; I thought my uncles wouldn't care as long as I wasn't in
their sight.

Suddenly one day in March 2007, during my break, I saw six
of my eight uncles down in the reception area. The receptionist was pointing
the way to where I was. Obviously they had come for me.

I jumped, I ran immediately. I went to my apartment near
the hospital. I just grabbed my bag and some money and left everything else.
The next morning I took a bus and fled the country. My sister later told me she
may have slipped and mentioned to someone on my mother's side of the family
where I was, and then it reached my uncles. But I had never believed they would
come all that way, that they would hunt me down to kill me.[101]

VI. Past Attacks

Sporadic reports of targeted killings of men seen as
"effeminate," or suspected of homosexual conduct, have reached the Western
press from Iraq since 2005. Although everyone we spoke to called the latest
campaign of murders vastly more organized and extensive than those earlier
assaults, testimonies demonstrate that fears about morality corrupted and
masculinity undermined are of long standing, and transgress sectarian lines.

Several Western reports since 2005 have pinned main or
exclusive responsibility for killings of gay men in Iraq on Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, supposedly operating through the Badr Organization, a shadowy
militia affiliated with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly
known as the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq or SCIRI), and
based, during most of the Saddam era, in Iran.[102]
The Badr Organization has engaged in death-squad killings and other egregious
human rights abuses since 2004.[103]
However, Human Rights Watch found no clear evidence to support speculation that
they have targeted men suspected of homosexual conduct, or that killers of
"gay" men took a direct impetus from Ayatollah Sistani. While those claims
cannot be definitely disproved, only one Iraqi we interviewed suggested that
the Badr Organization might be a key force in the killings, or that it acted on
an initiative from Sistani. He knew of no gay men who had actually been killed
by Badr Organization members.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani is an independent religious scholar
widely regarded as one of the highest-ranking clerics in the Shi'a world. While
he has supported attempts to unify Iraqi Shi'ites into a cohesive political
movement, he has avoided direct identification with particular Shi'ite
factions, including SCIRI. He has his own website, www.sistani.org; like the
cybersites of many Shi'ite imams, the forum fields questions and furnishes
religiously-predicated answers about everyday life, taking up whatever issues
its followers submit, on subjects alternately momentous and trivial. (Most of
the answers are almost certainly drafted and posted by apprentice clerics.)

In late 2005, the site responded to a question about "What
is the judgment for sodomy?" by calling it "forbidden" and punishable by "the
worst kind of death."[104]
The call to violence was extralegal and reprehensible. It clashed with the
norms of rule of law that Sistani himself had endorsed. The statement was a fatwa,
as is any answer from a qualified religious scholar on a question of
Islamic law. Unlike Sistani fatwas on issues of clear public concern in
Iraq, such as the form of the post-occupation government, this one stayed
confined to an obscure part of his website; his organization never publicized
it. Activists based in Europe called on him to retract it, and it disappeared
from the site in early 2006.

It received little or no notice in the Iraqi press. One man
told us that "I only heard about Sistani's fatwa on US websites on the
Internet."[105]
Its domestic impact cannot be gauged, but as a Western journalist experienced
in Iraq reminded us, "The militias don't need a fatwa to kill people
they don't like."[106]

Instead, most people maintained to us that the Mahdi Army
had always been the main actor in the violence, turning its attention at
irregular intervals since 2004 to what it saw as sexual immorality in Iraq.
Intermittent violence by Sunni militias, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,
accompanied this in Baghdad and elsewhere.[107] "Killings of gays
in Baghdad started in 2004, and that campaign lasted for about a year," Munir
remembered. "And then the militias became distracted with other issues, Shi'a
and Sunni."

In May 2004, we heard about the first group of gay people
who were killed. I knew three of them personally, but there were more I didn't
know. We didn't think much of it: people were being killed all the time then,
and we didn't think that it was a gay thing. But it became clearer to me when
five of my friends were killed, all within one month, with hand grenades. And
they also came after me.

It was in a gym in Baghdad. I was with a friend named
Mazen, and it was the Sadrists who came after us.

I was in the bathroom; I asked Mazen to get me a bottle of
water. He went out to get it, and that was when they shot him. There were three
who killed him. They were Sadrists driving red Opal cars, and wearing the dishdashi
[long white robe] and slippers, with green bands on their arms. People in
the gym came and said, "Hide, they are after you." I hid in the bathroom for
eight hours while the police came, till the gym owner told me, "Get out."

This was the first time I was attacked or threatened. My
friends told me, be careful, they might be after nicely dressed, effeminate
men. Another friend of mine was killed in a Sadr-controlled neighborhood. But
two others were killed in an area that was Qaeda-controlled. At that time there
was no problem between the Sadr militia and al-Qaeda. The killings of gays
lasted only until the tensions between Sunni and Shi'ite militias started; then
they started fighting each other.[108]

Mustafa lived in Basra, but travelled periodically to Baghdad
to visit places where gay men congregated. This became more dangerous after
Saddam's overthrow. "I tried going to the Sindbad Cinema," he says of one visit
in 2003 or 2004, "and the first day, nothing happened, but the second day I met
an old friend in the theater."

Then, all at once, some men with their faces shrouded in
black stopped the movie. Someone from the audience started pointing out
people-nine of us, including me and my friend. And the men in black took us out
of the theater. They said, "You are sodomites [luti] and you will be
taken and hanged."

You can recognize the Mahdi Army from their black outfits;
these were Sadrists, all right. We were standing there waiting to die. Then
someone screamed that the American forces were coming. The militia got scared
and we took advantage of the situation to try to run way. They shouted after
us, "Stop or we'll shoot." One of the militia threw a grenade. Shrapnel hit me
in the backside; the Americans thought the Sadrists were firing at them, and
they started shooting back. In the crossfire I got away.[109]

Internet use spread after Saddam's overthrow and became an
important social medium for people who desired, for whatever reason, to guard
their anonymity.[110]
The Mahdi Army quickly found ways to infiltrate cyberspace in search of
behaviors they reprobated. Samir says that in 2004, "I decided to meet this guy
whom I had got to know over [Internet] chat. I went to his apartment, and I
found four men there, with black clothes and beards-the signs of the Mahdi Army.
They beat me up and slashed my face and hands with knives." He showed us scars:
"They said, 'Next time we will kill you; this scar on your face is a warning.'"[111]

As Munir indicated, however, other militias also engaged in
periodic murders. Wahid, from a Sunni area of Baghdad, says al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia killed his boyfriend in 2004, when there was a "general cleansing
of people they thought were immoral. Barbers who pluck out hairs with a string
could be targeted because that was haram [forbidden]. They murdered
ice-sellers because there was no ice in the time of the Prophet." They
liquidated him in the al-Dora neighborhood:

He was hanging out on a street corner with a bunch of
friends, and they saw a group of bearded men pull up in a car. They asked for
him by name. He tried to run but they surrounded and cornered him. They tried
to get information from him, asking for names of gay friends. People came up
and saw there was a disturbance-so they just shot him and drove away.[112]

Omar is from Samarra. In 2006, "the Sunni militias killed my
boyfriend," he says-dating the attack a few months after the massive February
22 bombing of the al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi'a Islam, an
assault widely attributed to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. "I had led a very
secluded life, with my boyfriend."

But one day I got a threat, a piece of paper stuck on my
door, saying, "Stay away from this man, or we will kill you." Then they
kidnapped me: four people, masked so I couldn't see their faces. They beat me,
hit me with the butt of a gun over and over, and tried to get information from
me. They wanted me to confess to a sexual relationship with my boyfriend; I
told them, we are just friends, there is nothing between us. They held me one
day and when they realized they would get no information, they let me go.

Six days after they released me, my boyfriend was
kidnapped. He was a hairdresser; we had been together for four years. I heard
he had been killed from his family. His corpse was found in the street. The next
day, I ran away to Baghdad.[113]

Abductions were a recurrent tool of intimidation as well as
gathering information. Yehia related how Mahdi Army militiamen kidnapped him in
2005:

I could tell it was them, they dominated the whole Zafaroni
area [of Baghdad] where I lived. They were dressed in black with masks over
their faces, and they took me to a mosque called Husseineya Sadrayn; the Mahdi
Army was sort of occupying it. They must have heard in the neighborhood about
me. They asked me: "Why are you dressed like this? Why do you have your
eyebrows plucked? Why is your hair so long, why is your ear pierced?" They
said, "We are Muslims, and people like you should be killed."

At the mosque, a sheikh accused me of having sex
with men. I denied it. They let me go on the third day. But the militiamen went
to my parents and said, "Your son is gay and is drinking alcohol." They told
them I was a bad Muslim and should be punished. My parents were very shocked. I
had to leave home. My father and brothers warned me if they saw me, they would
kill me.[114]

Nuri, kidnapped by Ministry of Interior forces in 2009 as
recounted in detail above, told of a brush with the Mahdi Army almost three
years earlier:

I was walking in Karada in July 2006, when [men in] two
BMWs stopped me, beat me up, and put me in the trunk. There were a whole lot of
men in the cars, all armed and squashed in. It was around dusk. They took me to
a husseineya [prayer hall] in Sadr City. Everybody knows that when the
Mahdi Army arrest someone, they take them to Sadr City and kill them.

They took me out in front of the mosque and beat me, and
then they took me in, to the sheikh of the mosque. They told him I was a
sexual pervert and asked, should they kill me or just punish me? I thought the
Mahdi Army do not execute people under 18. I was just 18, but I told them I was
17 when they asked.

The Sheikh told them to burn me with coals from a narghile
[water pipe]. They shaved my head and burned me with coals. And then they
flogged me 90 times.

VII. The Situation of
Refugees

Pervasive social prejudice, family repression, lack of any
effective legal protection, and sudden outbursts of lethal violence all mean
that suspect men in Iraq are in steady danger.

Few Iraqis have altogether escaped the spreading circles of
sectarian, retaliatory, or random violence since the occupation began, just as
the state's ferocity under Saddam left few citizens wholly unscathed. Men seen
as effeminate or suspected of homosexual conduct are not necessarily more
intensely targeted than other groups or identities have been in recent years.
However, they have certain specific disadvantages.

Their isolated circles, organized round a few networks of
friends or anonymous aliases on the Internet, constitute nothing like a
cohesive community that could furnish mutual support. Nor, in most cases, are
their families willing to offer any help or protection, even if they could.
Many men who identify as gay have nowhere to turn, and no recourse but to leave
the country.

For most this means going to another, nearby country in the
region. There, their best hope is to register with the office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They must then endure the
time-consuming procedure of refugee status determination, in which the UNHCR
evaluates their case and decides whether their claim is valid. After that comes
the long and uncertain wait to be resettled elsewhere; the UNHCR must present
the refugee's file to sympathetic governments and ask them to accept him.
During these processes, which can last years, the applicants must stay where
they are.

For Iraqis who have already faced persecution based on
sexual orientation or gender identity, no country around Iraq is safe.

Years of violence in Iraq since 2003 have generated a
massive crisis of displacement. UNHCR estimates that nearly 2 million Iraqis
have fled the country, most to surrounding states.[116] Of
these, 291,000-about 14 percent of the estimated total-are registered with
UNHCR; only some 72,400 of these have so far been referred for resettlement,
and only 28,200 of them have actually been resettled.[117]
The vast majority of the estimated 2 million are in Syria (which UNHCR
estimates hosts around 1,200,000 Iraqis now, although only 206,000 have been
registered) and Jordan (with an estimated 450,000, of whom 52,000 are
registered).[118]

No figures are available-or are likely to become so-for what
proportion of any of these numbers have fled persecution based on sexual
orientation or gender identity. The UNHCR does not disaggregate data according
to the grounds of refugee claims. The relevant numbers are almost certainly
quite small as against the overall, overwhelming flood of people on the move.
However, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Iraqis in the refugee
system face, once again, specific dangers.

Consensual homosexual conduct is illegal in all the
countries surrounding Iraq except Turkey and Jordan. In Iran and Saudi Arabia
it is punished, under certain circumstances, by death. Refugees fleeing
persecution in Iraq because of their sexual orientation and gender identity may
face renewed persecution in virtually all the countries where they can find
interim refuge. Moreover, the absence of an open and substantial LGBT community
capable of providing even the barest mutual assistance, and the lack of any
family support for most LGBT people forced to flee, continue to restrict their
resources and leave them unprotected in the Diaspora.

Turkey has no legal penalties for homosexual conduct, but
violence against LGBT people is pervasive.[119] Although (unlike
Syria and Jordan) Turkey has signed both the 1951 Refugee
Convention and its 1967 Protocol, it has limited its accession to refugees of
European origin, thus precluding all Iraqi refugees from government grants of
asylum in Turkey. In order to keep them out of major cities, the Turkish
authorities routinely require asylum seekers and refugees to remain in
secondary cities and towns where support services (and civil society
organizations) are few and far between-and where a conservative social climate
puts LGBT people at risk of discrimination and abuse.[120](Partly
due to these restrictions, Turkey now hosts only 8,300 Iraqi refugees.)[121]

Meanwhile, although Jordan also has no
criminal penalties for homosexual conduct, the social and political climate is
still more repressive than Turkey's. One man described how Jordanian security
forces blackmailed and illegally expelled him in 2008 because of his sexual
orientation:

My situation in Jordan was completely legal. I had a work
visa and a legal job, and I had just registered with the UNHCR, where they gave
me a card with a number. Then the Jordanian mukhabarat [security] called
me on the phone. "We want to see you." I thought, maybe they knew I went to
some gay parties, or saw me at a particular mosque and thought I was an
extremist or something.

They asked me: "Are you gay?" I said, no. They said: "Yes
you are." I gave the [UNHCR] card to the mukhabarat and showed them the
legality of my visa. They said, "We don't care. You are a mennyak [fucker],
a faggot, and we don't want you in our country."

They twisted my arms hard behind me. They took my passport,
and wanted me to inform on Iraqis in Jordan-all kinds of Iraqis, not just gay
ones. They said, "Come back tomorrow."

The next day I returned and I refused [to cooperate]. They
cuffed my hands behind me and put me in a cell: "Why the fuck do you make this
shame with yourself?" they asked. I said: "Never, never!"

They took me to another jail or prison, and I spent seven
or eight days there. And then they sent me back to Iraq.[122]

Syria has been generous in receiving displaced Iraqis, but
its security and surveillance apparatus makes the strict legal penalties
against homosexual conduct a severe threat to LGBT refugees. One man,
registered with the UNHCR in Damascus-where he and a few fellow claimants
received periodic support from the London-based Iraqi LGBT group in the form of
money transfers-told us how security forces there deported him:

I think someone told the mukhabarat about us. They
called me to come and questioned me, asking me about Iraqi LGBT and our
relationship to this organization and why they are sending us money.

They asked if I am gay and about my relationship with my
friend Munir, because we lived in the same apartment and were together a lot. I
denied everything. There was a lot of verbal abuse; they were very harsh with
me. They asked me questions about people who had been visiting us-it was
obvious we'd been under heavy surveillance. And then, after two days, they
deported us.[123]

Their deportation almost cost his friend Munir his life.
Munir recounts:

When I was deported from Syria, the Syrians had written [on
my file] that it was because I was gay. And on the Iraqi side of the border,
they read that took my passport, and told me, "We will give you to the Ministry
of the Interior"-and that meant instant death. The border control people said,
"You were kicked out of Syria because of prostitution [di'ara] and we
are going to kill you."

They did it because they wanted money from me- $2,500 USD
to give my passport back. Because my file said I was gay, I was easy pickings.
I was at the Iraq border, then, for four days, without a cent. I couldn't go
forward; there was a checkpoint right in front of me, and without my passport
they would kill me.

So I made a deal with the Iraqi border guards: one of them
would take my passport and come with me to Baghdad, and I'd get the money
together there and pay him. I called every friend I had in Baghdad and they
somehow assembled the cash. He travelled all the way to Baghdad with me, and I
paid him and got my passport and my right to live back.[124]

UNHCR has recognized the seriousness of persecution based on
sexual orientation in Iraq. Its 2009 Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the
International Protection Needs of Iraqi Asylum-Seekers observe that "While
homosexuality is not prohibited by Iraqi law, it is a strict taboo and
considered to be against Islam. Since 2003, Iraq's largely marginalized and
vulnerable lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community has
frequently been targeted for attacks in an environment of impunity."[125]

The threats and difficulties those people face in the
surrounding countries of first asylum, however, demand attention. They can only
be resolved by a commitment-on the part both of the UNHCR and of Western
governments that have made paper promises about refugee protection-to remove
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Iraqi claimants from danger, and
resettle them expeditiously in safe countries.

VIII. Conclusion

Hamid said of the killers who had murdered his boyfriend:
"They say that they are Muslims, but they have nothing of Islam. They use
religion as a disguise to do what they want."[126]

If, as some believe, the killing campaign began as a way for
militia forces to recuperate their reputations and gain the luster of defending
morality, it has not worked. The invasions of privacy, the arbitrary murders,
the brutality and torture have flouted religion and morals alike. They have
left a growing number of Iraqis-even those who are not grieving their relatives
and sons-appalled. In May 2009, one reporter wrote courageously in Sawt
al-Iraq that the Mahdi Army "has once again sharpened its claws":

They are bullying civilians who have otherwise been safe,
in various forms of oppression, discrimination, and killing ... Once again,
they are intruding in every small and simple detail of everyday life; they
prevent the people from practicing daily activities that are normal in most
theocratic religious systems even in Saudi Arabia and Iran. ... Individuals are
violated, assaulted, and encroached upon in an agonizing way. In addition to
death threats against any man who grows his hair a couple of centimeters longer
than the Sadri standards that are measured exactly and applied harshly, there
are threats against those wearing athletic shorts or tight pants. ... These
standards are being used simply as a justification for killing homosexuals. ...The
slogan is to kill and kill, then kill again for the most trivial and simplest
things.

And he concluded,

In the meantime, we know that God is kind and cannot be
anything but merciful and loving to all beings. Even if he disapproves of
certain people or creatures, as a father does with his children, in any
religion he must be merciful. Religion should protect human life and should not
call for killing people because they wear long hair or shorts...

Human beings came into existence before the birth of any
ideology or religious beliefs. Thus, the holiness of life itself and the human
being should be held above the holiness of any particular ideology or belief.
It is illogical that the holiness of the ideology or belief created by human
beings is more holy than human life itself.[127]

An 18-year-old who had been threatened with death, and knew
several friends who had been killed, made much the same point when he told us:

God created people in all shapes and sizes. And you just
have to accept that this exists. If you don't like gay people, you're free to
condemn them; but you can't kill them. Don't talk to them. Don't associate with
them. But don't massacre them. This is just wrong. It has to stop.[128]

International Law

The government of Iraqi has legal obligations under
international human rights treaty law and customary law. It is bound by its own
treaty commitments and those of previous Iraqi governments.[129]

Most notable among Iraq's treaty obligations are those laid
out by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which
Iraq ratified in 1971.[130]
The ICCPR's protections place a mandate for action upon Iraqi authorities,
including officials who bear responsibility for enforcing security and the law
in Iraq.

The Right to Life and Security

Article 9 of the ICCPR affirms that "Everyone has the right
to liberty and security of person." (Similarly, the Arab Charter on Human
Rights, adopted in 1994 by the Council of the League of Arab States, of which
Iraq is a member, states in article 5 that "Every individual has the right to
life, liberty and security of person. These rights shall be protected by law.")
This right to security places an obligation on the Iraqi authorities not to
ignore known threats to the life of people within their jurisdiction, and to
take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect them.[131]
It mandates them to act where there are clear and identifiable threats against
individuals or groups-for instance, by fully investigating those threats with
the aim of putting an end to them. The UN Human Rights Committee (charged with
authoritatively interpreting the ICCPR and monitoring countries' compliance
with it) has repeatedly found states in violation of their obligations under
Article 9 if they have failed to take adequate steps to protect people in the
face of repeated death threats. The Committee has also criticized states'
failure to protect people from sexual-orientation-based violence.[132]

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or
Arbitrary Executions has noted that where the criminal justice system has
failed to investigate murders based on sexual orientation or gender identity,
the "state bears responsibility under human rights law for the many who have
been murdered by private individuals."[133]

Protection against Torture and Inhuman and
Degrading Treatment

The ICCPR prohibits any form of torture and inhuman
treatment, in its articles 7 and 10. Iraq is also a party to the Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
(Convention against Torture).[134]
The prohibition of torture is deeply rooted in customary international
law. The Arab Charter on Human Rights also affirms, in its article 13, that
"The States parties shall protect every person in their territory from being
subjected to physical or mental torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment. They shall take effective measures to prevent such acts and shall
regard the practice thereof or participation therein, as a punishable offence."

The ICCPR and the Convention against Torture detail what
states must do to enforce the prohibition, including the duty to investigate,
prosecute, and provide effective remedies when violations occur. [135]
The UN Human Rights Committee has also made clear that the duty to protect
people against torture or inhuman treatment extends not only to acts by
government officials, such as police, but also to acts inflicted by people in a
private capacity.[136]

Non-Discrimination and Fundamental Rights

Article 2 of the ICCPR requires a state party to "ensure to
all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights
recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind."Article 26
guarantees that "all persons are equal before the law and are entitled without
any discrimination to the equal protection of the law." The UN Human Rights
Committee has made clear on several occasions that sexual orientation is a
status protected against discrimination under these provisions.[137]
Unequal protection against violence, and unequal access to justice, are
prohibited under international law.

The ICCPR affirms the right to privacy (article 17), the
freedom of expression (article 19), and the freedom of assembly (article 21). These
rights entail the freedom to lead an intimate life peacefully; the freedom to
express oneself, including one's gender identity, through clothes or
comportment; and the freedom to move and meet in public without fear of
harassment or assault. The state must protect people in the enjoyment of these
rights. Persecution or harassment of people for exercising those freedoms must
be prevented where possible, and punished where it occurs.

Iraqi laws regulating any of these rights can only impose
such limitations as are consistent with international legal standards-that is,
they must be strictly necessary to achieve a legitimate purpose. As the UN
Human Rights Committee has advised, "Restrictive measures must conform to the
principle of proportionality; they must be appropriate to achieve their protective
function; they must be the least intrusive instrument amongst those which might
achieve the desired result; and they must be proportionate to the interest to
be protected."[138]
Any restrictions must also strictly observe the principle of non-discrimination.

No such restrictions should ever be used to penalize the
work of human rights defenders, including those who take up issues of sexual
orientation or gender identity. Both the Special Representative to the
Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders and the UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture have noted (in the former's words) the "greater risks ... faced by
defenders of the rights of certain groups as their work challenges social
structures, traditional practices and interpretation of religious precepts that
may have been used over long periods of time to condone and justify violation
of the human rights of members of such groups. Of special importance will be
... human rights groups and those who are active on issues of sexuality,
especially sexual orientation ... These groups are often very vulnerable to
prejudice, to marginalization and to public repudiation, not only by State
forces but other social actors."[139]

Recommendations

Human Rights Watch makes the following recommendations to
key actors:

To all militias including the Mahdi Army:

Cease all attacks against
civilians and the civilian population, including people targeted because
they do not correspond to norms of "masculinity," or are suspected of
homosexual conduct;

Condemn such violence explicitly and publicly.

To political, cultural, and religious leaders in Iraq and other countries
who have expressed support for militia and insurgent forces in Iraq:

Publicly condemn all violence
against civilians and the civilian population, including violence against
people targeted because they do not correspond to norms of "masculinity,"
or are suspected of homosexual conduct;

Publicly condemn militia groups that engage in such
violence, and voice public support for the rule of law.

To the government of Iraq:

Investigate all reports of
militia or other violence against people targeted because they do not
correspond to norms of "masculinity," or are suspected of homosexual
conduct, and appropriately punish those found responsible;

Publicly and expressly condemn
all such violence;

Investigate whether ties
continue between the Ministry of Interior and militias that have operated
in the past as quasi-independent security forces under the Ministry's
protection, including the Mahdi Army;

Investigate all claims of
abuse by police or security forces, including abuses against people
because they do not correspond to norms of "masculinity," or are suspected
of homosexual conduct, and appropriately punish those found responsible;

Investigate and prosecute all
Ministry of Interior officials involved in death squad killings or other
unlawful acts, including torture, assault, and extortion;

Properly vet and train all
police, security forces, and criminal justice officials, ensuring that
this entails training in human rights inclusive of issues of sexual
orientation and gender expression and identity, and establish effective
monitoring and accountability mechanisms;

Take all appropriate measures
to end torture, disappearances, summary killings, and other abuses, including
abuses based on sexual orientation and gender expression and identity;

Repeal article 128 of the
Criminal Code, which identifies "The commission of an offence with
honorable motives" as a "mitigating excuse";

Examine vague articles of the
Criminal Code, including paragraphs 401, 402, 501, 502, and 200(2), that
could justify arbitrary arrest or harassment of people due to their sexual
orientation or gender expression and identity, or could be used to prevent
civil society from addressing unpopular or stigmatized issues; repeal or
modify them if necessary, or otherwise ensure that they are not applied in
an arbitrary or discriminatory manner contrary to international human
rights law;

Create and support an
independent National Human Rights Commission;

Support the development of
domestic independent human rights non-governmental organizations with the
capacity to monitor the full range of human rights violations, and ensure
that they can operate without state harassment or interference;

Train all criminal-justice
authorities in effective responses to gender-based violence against women
and men;

Promote gender equality by embodying in legislation
explicit guarantees for women's equal rights to marriage, within marriage,
at the dissolution of marriage, and in inheritance.

To the US and the US-led multinational forces in Iraq:

Assist the government of Iraq
wherever possible in investigating militia or other violence against
people targeted because they do not correspond to norms of "masculinity,"
or are suspected of homosexual conduct;

End arbitrary detention
without trial, including the arbitrary detention of suspected militia
members; provide appropriate services to released detainees to assist them
to reintegrate into society and ensure that they do not return to
violence;

Assist the Iraqi government with vetting and training
police; ensure that all training programs contain a human rights component
and that human rights standards relating to privacy, protection against
torture, and other relevant issues are explicitly treated as containing no
exceptions for sexual orientation and gender expression and identity.

To the governments of all states in the region:

Ensure that no Iraqi refugees
are subject to refoulement, either at the border (by refusing to grant
access) or after entering the host country;

Ensure that all government agencies treat all Iraqi
refugees within your borders with dignity and respect for their human
rights, without exceptions, including exceptions based on sexual
orientation or gender identity.

To the UN High Commission for Refugees:

In coordination with the
United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq, closely monitor and report on
attacks and abuses based on sexual orientation and gender expression and
identity in Iraq;

Intervene actively to protect
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender asylum seekers and refugees from
abuse in countries of first asylum within the region, and to prevent any
threatened refoulement;

Secure rapid resettlement of those refugees in countries
outside the region, with the active cooperation of countries of first
asylum and resettlement countries.

To other concerned governments and international agencies:

Insist that all states in the
region treat lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Iraqis fleeing the country
in full accordance with international standards;

Recognizing that lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender Iraqi refugee claimants are in situations of
legal danger and face severe social prejudice in all surrounding
countries, provide rapid and where necessary accelerated resettlement in
third countries;

Assist with legal reform in
Iraq in accordance with all international human rights standards,
including those relating to sexual orientation and gender identity;

Monitor and assist the
performance of criminal justice, police, security, and counterterrorism
institutions and personnel in Iraq to ensure full compliance with
international human rights standards;

Support the development in
Iraq of an independent National Human Rights Commission and local
independent human rights non-governmental organizations with the capacity
to monitor the full range of human rights violations.

Glossary of Terms

Biological sex:
the biological classification of bodies as male or female, based on such
factors as external sex organs, internal sexual and reproductive organs,
hormones, or chromosomes.

Gender: the social
and cultural codes (as opposed to biological sex) used to
distinguish between what a society considers "masculine" or
"feminine" conduct.

Gender expression: the external characteristics and behaviors that societies define as
"masculine" or "feminine"-including such attributes as
dress, appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns, and social behavior and
interactions.

Gender identity: a
person's internal, deeply felt sense of being male or female, or something
other than male and female.

Gender-based violence: violence directed against a person on the basis of gender or sex.
Gender-based violence can include sexual violence, domestic violence,
psychological abuse, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, harmful
traditional practices, and discriminatory practices based on gender. The term
originally described violence against women but is now widely taken to include
violence targeting both women and men because of how they experience and
express their genders and sexualities.

Sexual orientation:
the way in which a person's sexual and emotional desires are directed. The term
categorizes according to the sex of the object of desire-that is, it describes
whether a person is attracted primarily to people of the same or opposite sex,
or to both.

Heterosexual: a
person attracted primarily to people of the opposite sex.

Homosexual: a
person attracted primarily to people of the same sex.

Gay: a synonym for
homosexual in English and some other languages, sometimes used only to describe
males who are attracted primarily to other males.

Lesbian: a woman
attracted primarily to other women.

LGBT: lesbian,
gay, bisexual, or transgender; an inclusive term for groups and identities
sometimes also associated together as "sexual minorities."

Acknowledgements

This report was written by Scott Long, director of the
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch.
The report is based on research conducted by Rasha Moumneh, researcher in the
Middle East/North Africa division at Human Rights Watch, and by Scott Long. It
was edited by Samer Muscati, researcher in the Middle East/North Africa
division; Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East/North Africa
division; Bill Frelick, director of the refugee policy program; Aisling Reidy,
senior legal advisor; and Joe Saunders, deputy program director. Jessica
Ognian, Grace Choi, Anna Lopriore, and Fitzroy Hepkins provided production
assistance.

Ahmad A. Ahmad, professor in the department of religious studies at the
University of California Santa Barbara and consultant to Human Rights Watch,
researched and drafted materials on shari'a law. Invaluable support for
Human Rights Watch's research was provided by Georges Azzi and Ghassan Makarem
as well as other staff and volunteers of Helem in Lebanon; Ali Hili of Iraqi
LGBT; Stephany El Haddad; Lea Bardaghgi; Hania Mufti; and Nir Rosen. Staff of
the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) also
provided extensive assistance. Numerous people both inside and outside Iraq
who cannot be named for their own safety, or their families' security,
furnished information and help in many other ways.

[2] "The War
Between the 'Puppies' and the Kidnappers," Al-Esbuyia, May 10-16, 2009.

[3]
See Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the
Struggle for Iraq (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), for a detailed
account not only of al-Sadr's career but of the Mahdi Army's ambitions and modus
operandi.

[4]
Quoted in Nizar Latif, "Iraqi 'Executioner' Defends Killing of Gay Men," The
National, May 2, 2009, http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090503/FOREIGN/705029847/100,
accessed May 29, 2009. The man also claimed that he had been a Mahdi Army
member "but was now working independently after the militia was disbanded by
the leader of the Sadr movement, Muqtada al-Sadr." However, al-Sadr never
dissolved the militia, simply ordered it to stand down when the US surge began.
It remains a recognizable and powerful force in Sadr City and elsewhere.

[7]See, for example, Timothy Williams and Tareq Maher, "Iraq's Newly
Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder," New York Times, April 7, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/middleeast/08gay.html, accessed May 2,
2009: "The chief of a Sadr City police station … said family members had probably
committed most of the Sadr City killings. He played down the role of death
squads that had once been associated with the Mahdi Army, the militia that controlled Sadr
City until American and Iraqi forces dislodged them last spring. 'Our
investigation has found that these incidents are being committed by relatives
of the gays - not just because of the militias,' he said. 'They are killing
them because it is a shame on the family.'"

[13]Thus Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, writing on the
principle of "Wilayat al-Faqih" or the "government of the jurist,"
emphasizes that fixed punishments (hudud) can only be applied by an
established authority (either an imam or a credentialed jurist). Sunni
jurists impose basically the same requirements for a conviction as Ja'fari law.
However, while most Shi'ite theories of political authority-theories of who is
empowered to apply the laws-take the figure of the imam as their
ultimate model of just rule, Sunni theories treat legitimate government as derived
from other models, such as "contract" or "necessity." See, for instance, Hamid
Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1982). In
addition, Sunni jurists require only two witnesses to establish proof of liwat
as opposed to four in Ja'fari law, though Sunni jurists require four
witnesses to prove illicit heterosexual intercourse (zina).

[15]Shaykh
al-Ta'ifah al-Tusi, Tahdhib al-Ahkam, vol. 10, Bab
al-Hudud fi-l-Liwat, tradition 198/7, tells how Amir al-Mu'minin Imam Ali received a
man who confessed to liwat three times. Amir al-Mu'minin finally told
him after his fourth confession that his punishment would be death. The man
repented, however, leading Imam Ali to weep and set him free-telling him that
his repentance caused the angels to weep as well.

Meanwhile, the Hanafi school of Sunni
jurisprudence adds another limitation: applying death as a hadd for anal
intercourse between men is restricted to cases when liwat has become an 'ada
or habit, as opposed to acts that occur only once. Ibn
'Abidin (d. 1836 CE), Radd al-Muhtar 'ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar (Beirut:
Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi, 1987), vol. 3, pp. 155-6.

[16]The United States and the US-led coalition in Iraq have, in
recent months, rapidly cycled out of detention people arbitrarily arrested
during the surge, while apparently providing only nugatory support or services
to prevent a return to violence. At the height of the surge, the US held over
26,000 prisoners in Camp Bucca, a detention camp near the Kuwaiti border; by
March 2009, this number had reportedly fallen to under 10,000. See Anthony
Shadid, "In Iraq, Chaos Feared as U.S. Closes Prison," Washington Post, March
22, 2009. The practice of arbitrary detention undermines efforts to build the
rule of law in Iraq. If neither coalition authorities nor the Iraqi government
accept any substantive responsibilities to assist detainees' reintegration upon
their release, it also risks feeding the resurgence of militia violence.

[17] Curiously,
though, two people told us that the word was taken up in 2009 by the
killers themselves. Once it appeared a poster seen in Sadr City calling for divine
punishment on mithliyeen : Human Rights Watch interview with Fadi (not
his real name), Iraq, April 18, 2009. In another case, according to a rumor, a
corpse found near Sadr City "had mithliyeen carved on his back. Strange,
this is the politically correct word. In Iraq the word mithliyeen
doesn't exist. I had never heard the word before." Human Rights Watch interview
with Hussein (not his real name), Iraq, April 23, 2009. Everything suggests the
killers did their research, down to visiting gay websites, answering personal
advertisements, and entrapping men there; in the process of such
investigations, their dictionaries may have undergone diversification.

[19]More than a Name: State-Sponsored Homophobia and Its Consequences in
Southern Africa, a report by Human Rights Watch and the International Gay
and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 2003, p. 8.

[20]
Even these terms, however, have gendered distinctions engraved in their histories-between
those who take "masculine" and those who take "feminine" roles as expressed in
sexual positions and practices. One historian notes that "The term luti was
typically used of [the "active" partner in sex between men], while mukhannath
or ma'bun or (more colloquially) 'ilq was reserved for [the
"passive" partner]. It is worth dwelling on this point, since there is a
persistent tendency among some modern scholars to overlook this distinction and
render the indigenous term luti as 'homosexual.' In Islamic law, the luti
is a man who commits liwat … regardless of whether he commits it as
an active or passive partner. However, in ordinary, non-technical language …
the term luti almost always meant … [someone] thought to be interested
in active-insertive anal intercourse…" Khaled al-Rouayheb, Before
Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 16.

[22]Sabah Mohsen Kazem, "The Feminization of Young Men: Diagnosis and
Treatment," Al-Sabah, May 7, 2009.

[23]
Moreover, international human rights law recognizes that
restrictive social prescriptions dictating what men and women may do are a
source of rights abuses. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, in its article 5, calls on states "To
modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a
view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other
practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of
either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women." Iraq ratified
the Convention in 1986.

[60]Criminal
Code: Law Number 111 of 1969 and its Amendments (Third Edition), ed. Nabeel
Abdelrahman Hiyawi (Baghdad: Legal Library, 2008). Amnesty International has
reported that in November 2001, as part of a moral cleansing campaign, the
Revolutionary Command Council (RCC)-the country's highest executive body under
the Saddam regime-"issued a decree to provide the death penalty for the
offences of prostitution, homosexuality, incest and rape." ("Iraq" in Amnesty
International Annual Report 2002: The State of the World's Human Rights.) Human
Rights Watch has been unable to find the exact text of this decree. Amnesty
International believes the decree was temporary (email to Human Rights Watch
from an Amnesty International researcher, June 11, 2009), and in any case
Revolutionary Command Council decrees are no longer in force under Iraq's
post-invasion government.

[62]
Reporters Sans Frontieres, "Doctor Jailed in Kurdistan for Writing about
Homosexuality," December 2, 2008. Kurdish Regional Government president Masoud
Barzani freed Hussein two weeks later as part of a seasonal spate of pardons:
Reporters San Frontieres, "Kurdish
President Pardons Doctor who Was Jailed for Writing about Homosexuality,"
December 8, 2008, both at http://arabia.reporters-sans-frontieres.org/article.php3?id_article=29508,
accessed May 2, 2009.

[63]Timothy Williams and Tareq Maher, "Iraq's Newly Open Gays Face
Scorn and Murder," New York Times, April 8, 2009.

[68]This quotation and those following are from Human Rights Watch
interviews with Nuri (not his real name), Beirut, Lebanon, April 15 and 27,
2009.

[69]Although Nuri says the officers called the paper a "court order,"
he did not see it, nor did the police say what alleged crime had led to the
death sentence. Secret executions by judicial sentence have
apparently been widespread in Iraq since 2003. (See for instance Brian
Bennett, "The Secrets of Iraq's Death Row," Time, November 12, 2006,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1558285,00.html, accessed May
3, 2009.)However, if the men were executed judicially, it is not clear
what the charges might have been.Among the laws listed above-ones that
might be invoked against homosexual conduct or against rights defenders
addressing gender or sexual orientation-the highest penalty (under paragraph
200) is seven years' imprisonment.

In April
2009, Iraqi LGBT shared with Human Rights Watch a copy of a note allegedly
smuggled out of an Iraqi detention center. The writer said Ministry of Interior
forces had arrested him:

They beat me heavily and asked me strange questions.
They spoke badly to me and kicked me on my head and my buttocks to elicit false
information from me because of my membership in Iraqi LGBT. They then
transferred me to the criminal court in al-Koukh and after an extremely speedy
trial they sentenced me to death without giving me the opportunity to defend
myself or appoint a lawyer. .. Two days later they informed me that the
execution will take place in the next two weeks. … I send you this appeal, is
there anyone who can help me before it is too late? (Scan of the note, in
Arabic, on file with Human Rights Watch)

The note was not dated and
did not mention the charges (if the victim even knew them). Iraqi LGBT also
told us they had received, from Baghdad sources, the names of four other Iraqis
also detained and facing death. It is possible that this information dated back
to February and that these five were the men whose corpses Nuri saw.

Human Rights Watch wrote
to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Human Rights on April 3,
asking urgently for information about the five men's whereabouts and fates. We
did not receive a reply.

If the note is authentic,
it still cannot be confirmed that the "trial" was an actual judicial process-or
that the "court order" police flashed before Nuri was real. These may have been
extrajudicial killings carried out by Ministry forces.

On March 27, 2009, Iraqi
LGBT went public with the information in that note, to forestall what it
believed were the pending executions of the five. It warned that "Urgent action
is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of
those awaiting execution were convicted for the 'crime' of homosexuality"
(Iraqi LGBT, "Stop Executions of Gay Iraqis: Members of Iraqi LGBT Group on
Death Row: Action Needed to Halt Judicial Executions," March 27, 2009, at
http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/, accessed May 29, 2009). These numbers came
from an alert issued earlier that month by Amnesty International, on the
imminent execution of 128 convicts in Iraq (Amnesty International, "128 Face
Execution in Batches of 20," March 12, 2009, at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/iraq-128-face-execution-batches-20-20090312,
accessed May 4, 2009). Amnesty had no indication that any of those men
were accused of homosexual conduct. Nonetheless, Iraqi LGBT-which had not
spoken to Nuri since his release-assumed that the five were alive and among the
larger number on death row.

Based on the evidence,
Human Rights Watch concludes that if the five named by Iraqi LGBT were
executed, it happened earlier, when Nuri was arrested in February. However, the
Iraqi LGBT news release, claiming that "many" of the 128 had been convicted of
"homosexuality," inadvertently led to confusion among activists and bloggers in
the US and Europe. A petition was launched "to save
the lives of 128 prisoners sentenced to death because they are homosexual,"
and the false claim that all those on death row were "gay" received wide
currency. (See Everyone Group, "Petition to save the lives of 128 homosexuals
sentenced to death in Iraq," April 3, 2009,
http://www.everyonegroup.com/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2009/4/3_Petition_to_save_the_lives_of_128_homosexuals_sentenced_to_death_in_Iraq.html,
accessed April 14, 2009). Iraqi LGBT soon clarified that it believed only five
of the 128 were "gay." However, the misimpression still
spread.

[78]Human Rights Watch interview with Haytham (not his real name),
Iraq, April 18, 2009. The New York Times reported in April that
"clerics associated with Moktada al-Sadr … have devoted a portion of
Friday prayer services to inveighing against homosexuality. 'The community
should be purified from such delinquent behavior like stealing, lying and the
effeminacy phenomenon among men,' Sheik Jassem al-Mutairi said during his
sermon last Friday." Timothy Williams and Tareq Maher, "Iraq's Newly Open Gays
Face Scorn and Murder," New York Times, April 8, 2009. Even Sunni
preachers shared in the fears, and loudly; one (Christian) man told Human
Rights Watch that "while passing on the street, I heard a Friday sermon in a
Sunni mosque about this soap called Noor, and the sheikh was shouting
about the lead actor and saying, 'All the women want to fall in love with him
but he is of the third sex; and how can this be happening?'" Human Rights Watch
interview with Tariq (not his real name), Iraq, April 18, 2009. Noor, a
dubbed-in-Arabic version of the Turkish soap opera Gümüş, is wildly popular throughout much of
the Middle East, with plots tackling such issues as premarital sex and
abortion. The male lead, Muhannad, is in fact heterosexual, but he supports his
wife's independence and career. The (long-haired) actor who plays him has
become not just a sex symbol but a symbol of non-traditional sex and gender
roles. Religious traditionalists in many countries vociferously condemn the
show.

[96] In 2000,
however, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan repealed the provision in the
territory it controlled, and in 2002 the Kurdistan Parliament did so throughout
the territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Despite this,
however, fears remain that prosecution and sentencing for honor crimes in the
KRG are still inadequate in practice. In a 2009 report, Amnesty International
voiced concern that "at
least in some cases [KRG] criminal courts have continued to pronounce
inappropriately lenient sentences for men convicted of killing a female
relative": Hope and Fear: Human Rights in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, an
Amnesty International report, MDE 14/006/2009. Moreover, tribal courts or komalayeti
often hear cases that never reach Kurdish government courts; the
dispensation of justice by patriarchal elders further limits the impact of the
reforms.

[97]See, however, Trapped by Violence: Women in Iraq, an
Amnesty International report, MDE 14/005/2009. Several works by Iraqi and
Western authors have tried to bring attention to violence against women in the
country, both during the Saddam period and under the occupation. See Nadje
Sadig al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present
(London: Zed Books, 2007); Nadje Sadig al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of
Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009); and HaifaZangana, City
of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance (New York: Seven
Stories, 2007).

[102]See, for instance, Doug Ireland, "Iraqi Gay Murders Surge; World
Finally Takes Note," Gay City News (New York), April 16, 2009, at
http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20299642&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=6,
accessed May 2, 2009: "anti-gay death squads of the Badr Corps … [have] been
responsible for a large majority of the murders of gays" in Iraq.

[103]
SCIRI founded the Badr Brigade while in exile in Iran in the
1980s. After the 2003 invasion, this group renamed itself the Badr Organization for Reconstruction and Development. It failed to honor
promises to disarm, and developed close ties to Iraq's Ministry of Interior; it
is not certain, but is widely suspected, that its infiltration of the ministry
survived attempts to purge government offices of militia members during the US
"surge." See Edward Wong, "Leaders of Iraq Support Militias and Widen
Rift," New York Times, June 9, 2005, and Council on Foreign
Relations, Iraq: Militia Groups,at http://www.cfr.org/pub8175/lionel_beehner/iraqmilitia_groups.php,
accessed April 10, 2009.

[104]
The text has disappeared from Sistani's website, but is on file with Human
Rights Watch.

[107]Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a loose grouping of Sunni insurgent
forces (originally founded as the Group for Monotheism and
Struggle by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) that fought its way to
prominence attacking occupation forces in 2004.

[108]
Human Rights Watch interview with Munir (not his real name), Iraq, April 20,
2009. The Mahdi Army cooperated, at least in a limited way, with al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia along with other Sunni militias early in the resistance to the
occupation, in 2004. These alliances broke down by 2005, as sectarian civil war
erupted across Iraq.

[110]In postwar Iraq as in many other countries around the world,
chatrooms and personals websites for gay-identified men combined the
opportunity for social outreach with the apparent promise of security. One
told us:

The Internet is very important for gays in Iraq because
it seems to offer safety. Before that, you would have to meet very discreetly
in public places: you'd see a guy and go across to talk to him, and you didn't
know if he was gay or straight or pretending to be gay, if he would beat you
up or rob you. With the Internet, you can sort of check out people before you
reach out to them or give them personal information.

[111]
Human Rights Watch interview with Samir (not his real name), Iraq, April 24,
2009. Bilal says that "Two years ago, one of my friends was kidnapped through
Yahoo [Messenger]. He was chatting with someone who said, 'I want to meet you':
when he went to the meeting place, there were two men waiting and they
kidnapped him. They stole his phone with all the numbers on it, blindfolded him
and beat him, kicked him, pulled out his fingernails. This was the Mahdi
Army-they told him so; they said, 'We clear the community of people like you.'
They wanted a ransom from his family; they ask each time for twenty or thirty
thousand US dollars. But they told him they would kill him the next day
anyway. They were on the first floor, so he threw himself out the window and
escaped." Human Rights Watch interview with Bilal (not his real name), Iraq,
April 20, 2009.

[124]Human Rights Watch interview with Munir (not his real name),
Iraq, April 20, 2009. Two other gay Iraqis who had lived in Syria, but had not
applied for refugee status with the UNHCR, told us how Syrian police arrested
them on the street in Damascus in December 2006: their story illustrates the
dangers that "effeminate" foreigners may face. The police stopped them,
demanding "Are you boys or girls?"

They pulled down our pants to see what sex we were,
then beat us on the street in front of everybody. Then they took us to the Bab Mousalla police station. In a day
or so, they took us to the Bashar Asad hospital, to do tests to see if we were
gay. The doctor asked us to take our pants down and we had to kneel in front
of him. He asked each of us to count to ten and inserted his thumb in the
anus. Then he said, "They're gay."

After that, it was back to the police station, and they
put us each in a solitary cell as small as a WC. Then there were three days
of torture. In the morning, they beat us up and electroshocked us from 10 to 12
a.m. At night, from 10 to midnight, we were showered in cold water and
stretched with our hands and feet tied, and they whipped us.

Then we were taken to court. We didn't have a
lawyer. They charged us with fujur [debauchery]. The prosecutor said
we had had sex with American marines and Iraqi militias back in Iraq. The
judge said: "We don't like you Iraqis; why do you come to this country?" We
were sentenced to prison for six months. From the prison, we managed to hire
a lawyer, and he got us set free, but expelled from the country. We were
expelled in February 2007, and we cannot go back for five years. They just
took us to the Iraqi border and left us there.

Human Rights Watch
interview with Yehia and Abbas (not their real names), Beirut, Lebanon, July
10, 2009. In its reporting on other countries, Human Rights Watch has
documented the intrusive and abusive practice of spurious anal examinations to
"prove" homosexual conduct; see In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice
in Egypt's Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct, a Human Rights Watch report,
2004. As Human Rights Watch shows there, when conducted in carceral
conditions without consent, such examinations constitute torture.

[129]The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, opened for signature May
23, 1969, 115 U.N.T.S. 331, establishes that obligations under international
agreements are not terminated by a change in government.

[139]
"Report of the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Human
Rights Defenders," UN Doc. E/CN.4/2001/94 (2001), at para. 89g; cited in
"Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Question of Torture and other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment," UN General Assembly, A/56/156,
July 3, 2001.